Florence Peake
Presenting work internationally and across the UK in galleries, theatres and the public realm, Peake is known for an approach which is at once sensual and witty, expressive and rigorous, political and intimate. Peake produces movement, interactive sculpture, paintings that use the whole body's physicality, text, film and drawings which respond and intercept each other to articulate, extend and push ideas.
Peake's work explores notions of materiality and physicality: the body as site and vehicle of protest; the erotic and sensual as tools for queering materiality; the subjective and imagined body as a force equal to those that move in our objective flesh-bound world. By encouraging chaotic relationships between the body and material, Peake creates radical and outlandish performances, which in turn generate temporary alliances and micro-communities within the audience. Peake's painting is as an extension of the body itself: it is produced gesturally and performatively, and is both a manifestation of the external body in motion and the way personal experience and feeling is recorded within the tissue and bones. Her painting practice comes together with sculpture and performance in a reciprocal nature: engaging in a shared dialogue and creating multiple modes of processing performance, and the interrelations between dancers, audiences and sites.
Peake has worked with filmmakers, artists and choreographers including Joe Moran, Gaby Agis, Tai Shani, Jonathan Baldock, Serena Korda, Nicola Conibere, Gary Stevens, Catherine Hoffmann, Eve Stainton, Station House Opera and Theatre of Mistakes. Peake’s recent exhibition Your Meaning Not Your Materiality (YMNYM), first presented at Leeds Art Gallery in 2024, is currently on view at Hospitalfield and will subsequently tour to theCOLAB, London. Recent institutional solo exhibitions include the commissioned performance To Love and to Cherish (2025) at Jupiter Artland, UK, and Factual Actual: Ensemble at Southwark Park Galleries, London; Towner Eastbourne and Fruitmarket, Edinburgh (2023–2024). Her work was part of the group exhibitions Motion in Stillness: Dance and the Human Body in Movement at Victoria Miro, London (2024–2025), and Hayward Gallery's touring British Art Show 9 (2021).
Other exhibitions and performances include at Arsenic theatre and Sudpol theatre in Switzerland (2020), 58th 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).
