Florence Peake: Vitalities at HOME

This autumn, HOME welcomes Vitalities, a solo exhibition by the internationally acclaimed artist, Florence Peake. 

Vitalities gives a physical space to loss. The artist brings together professional dancers, studio assistants, and queer-identifying participants from Manchester who have experienced grief. Together, they’ve made an installation of sculptures and drawings, activated by live performance.

Florence Peake is a London-based artist who’s been making work since the mid-1990s. Her practice spans painting, sculpture, dance and performance, often within a single project. She trained in dance and choreography, and even her sculpture starts there: she treats plaster casting as a kind of choreography.

At HOME, Peake makes absence concrete. During workshops with volunteers, in what is now her trademark process, the artist poured plaster between people to preserve the space between them. While they bear human traces and textures, it’s the absence of the body that forms the basis of the sculptures. Vitalities, then, refers to the spaces left behind when someone, or something, disappears and the objects remain imbued with their energy. In the artist’s own words: “I am thinking of how spaces for loss can become vital spaces.” 

Grief is rarely straightforward and Vitalities makes room for its full complexity. Peake particularly spotlights queer grief, giving a distinct physical presence to experiences of loss that are often overlooked. It’s here that Manchester’s LGBTQIA+ communities come in, collaborating with Peake on some of the works and sharing their own experiences of loss.

Bathed in red, the main gallery is home to a host of sculptures: plaster and hessian husks of bodies hold the shapes they once enveloped. Their flowing forms are challenged by cast concrete dumbbells resting heavily on the floor, symbolising the physicality of flesh.

While grief and loss form the foundations of the show, the tension between the private and public infuses Peake’s practice as a whole. Her exploration of grief comes from a personal experience which is expanded and eventually shared with her collaborators, and later viewers. The isolating experience of sorrow becomes a shared space.

Drawing and painting represent a more private dimension of Peake’s practice. At HOME, viewers can see her enigmatic markings on a central floating wall, rendered on thick black paper. Created with the artist’s distinct visual vocabulary, this wall will anchor the gallery’s live performance activations.

Known for “encouraging chaotic relationships between the body and material”, Peake’s live activations will transform the gallery every two weeks. Dancers will use paint and a unique set of gestures to interact with the static works so no two performances will be the same. 

Vitalities is the culmination of three years of research and making as part of Your Meaning Not Your Materiality, a project that has featured interactive outdoor sculpture, exhibitions and performances across the UK. And Manchester gets a first: Peake’s debut solo show in the North West, made with the people who call it home.