Florence Peake is an artist whose work explores the intrinsic connection between the body and materiality. Drawing from her background in choreography and somatic practice, her work incorporates performance and material-based mediums such as painting and sculpture in a reciprocal nature, using one to leverage and inform the other. By foregrounding the typically concealed processes of art creation, Peake orchestrates performances that encourage chaotic relationships between body and material, generating the foundation of her paintings and drawings. Through this symbiotic relationship, Peake accentuates the disparity between the outcome and the process, presenting the contrast between represented reality (fictional body) and the tactile, felt experience (empirical body). Her work underscores how we perceive something versus its intrinsic nature, bringing to attention the disconnect between experiential reality and objective reality.
Factual Actual (2022) is a series of works that capture the contrast of the imagined body with its objective form. With different iterations existing as small to large scale paintings, drawings and performances, the works are induced by the bodily sensations of having multiple limbs, many breasts, eyes on the back of her head and multiple genders layering over each other. Peake’s making process starts with lying on the paper and marking around her body, drawing around it as she moves, immortalising both the physical and embodied traces she creates. In addition to these corporeal sensations, Factual Actual also responds to heartbreak, grief and loneliness experienced during the pandemic, and the bodily sensations of troubled times. Factual Actual Release 7 (2023) showcases a definitive outline of a face - a rare occurrence amongst Peake’s paintings that suitably marks the end of the Factual Actual series. Meanwhile, Factual Actual Performance Documentation 9 and 10 (2022) are small-scale paintings documenting Peake’s Factual Actual: Ensemble, performed at Southwark Park Galleries in 2023, a multilayered, performative, queer Gesamtkunstwerk, which plays with and off the ritualistic connotations of its surroundings to literally grapple with the history of painting.
Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery has acquired numerous figurative works over the last ten years. Peake’s practice sits in this trajectory, with a particular focus on movement and the body. The works also sit within a broader collection focusing on performance and choreography, with recent acquisitions including works such as Joe Moran’s Singular and Johanna Billing’s I’m Lost Without Your Rhythm (2009). The three works by Peake will form the centre piece for a new collection display in Norwich Castle’s modern and contemporary art gallery from January 2024.
