Episode 19: Florence Peake

Florence Peake is a London-based artist who has been making solo and group performance works intertwined with an extensive visual art practice since 1995. Presenting work internationally and across the UK in galleries, theatres and the public realm, she is known for an approach which is at once sensual and witty, expressive and rigorous, political and intimate. Florence explores notions of materiality and physicality: from the body as site and vehicle of protest to the erotic and sensual as tools for queering materiality. Most recently, she’s been working on her exhibition and performance, ‘Factual Actual’, focusing on the possibilities of painting, exploring its relationship to movement and upending its static representation often found in museum collections. Originally commissioned by London’s National Gallery in 2021, 'Factual Actual' has been on show at Southwark Park Galleries since 16th April, and will close this weekend on 2nd July before touring to Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery and Towner Gallery in Eastbourne later in 2023 and 2024. Alongside ‘Factual Actual’, Richard Saltoun Gallery in London has also been showing ‘Enactment’, a complementary exhibition open until 8th July that presents new installations, sculptures, canvases, and works on paper that continue Florence’s artist's research into the possibilities of painting. I couldn’t wait to sit down and speak to Florence about where her interest in melding human bodies and artistic materials came from, the absurdity of the performance-making process, and why she never lets her work arrive in one place.