Art Taaalkssss: Florence Peake

Florence Peake, Touch Horizontal Pleasure, 2017, performers: Rosalie Wahlfrid and Katye Coe, Bosse & Baum, London, photo: Anne Tetzlaff

The performance practice of Florence Peake (born in London where she lives and works) uses drawing, painting and sculpture combined with found and fabricated objects placed in relation to the moving body. Her work explores notions of materiality and physicality; the body as site and vehicle of protest. By encouraging chaotic relationships between the body and material, she creates radical and outlandish performances, building temporary alliances and micro-communities within the audience. Following on from performances she often creates sculptures and paintings; these artworks serve as ways of processing the experience of the performance itself, relationships with dancers, audiences and sites. 

Florence Peake is currently a resident at La Becque | Artists residency, La Tour-de-Peilz, where a new set of her sculptures and a performance are part of Modern Nature, a garden and artistic program revolving around the life and work of the British avant-garde filmmaker and gardener Derek Jarman. Recent exhibitions and performances of Florence Peake include Arsenic, Lausanne (2020); The Venice Biennale 2019 with Eve Stainton; CRAC Occitanie, Sète (2018); London Contemporary Music Festival, London (2018); De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill (2018); Palais De Tokyo, Paris (2018); Hayward Gallery, London (2018); Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge (2017); Serpentine, London (2016); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2016); ICA, London (2016); and Modern Art Oxford (2016).