Florence Peake is a London-based artist who has been making work since 1995. She makes solo and group performance works intertwined with an extensive visual art practice. Presenting work internationally and across the UK in galleries, theatres and outdoors, she is known for an approach which is at once sensual and witty, expressive and rigorous, political and intimate. Peake’s practice uses movement, text, film, drawing, painting and sculpture that respond and intercept each other to articulate and extend ideas through different media. Her work explores notions of materiality and physicality; the body as site and vehicle of protest. The energetic, chemical body and feeling states of being are also key to her thinking and ideas using the erotic, sensual for queering of materiality. The subjective and imagined body as a force equal to our objective flesh bound world. By encouraging chaotic relationships between the body and material, she creates radical and outlandish performances, creating temporary alliances and micro-communities within the audience. She makes large scale paintings using the whole bodys physicality, interactive sculpture works, film and text.
Peake is part of the Hayward Gallery’s touring British Art Show 9 (2021). Peake’s work has been presented at Arsenic theatre and Sudpol theatre in Switzerland (2020),Venice Biennale 2019; CRAC Occitanie, Sète, France (2018), London Contemporary Music Festival, UK (2018), Bosse & Baum, London, UK (2019); De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill, UK (2018); Palais De Tokyo, Paris, France (2018); Hayward Gallery, London UK (2018), Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, UK (2017), Studio Leigh, London UK (2017); Sara Zanin Gallery, Rome, Italy (2017); Serpentine, London UK (2016); Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2016); ICA, London (2016); Modern Art Oxford (2016); BALTIC, Newcastle UK (2013), Frieze, London UK (2013), Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2012).
