Florence Peake (b 1973, London) makes solo and group performances, interactive sculpture, paintings and drawings that use the human body to explore notions of materiality and physicality. Peake’s radical performances push the idea of the body as a medium of protest, and the erotic as a tool for queering materiality, whether in clay, paint, or other art media. Presenting work 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.

Trained as a dancer and Teacher of the Skinner Releasing Technique, Peake received her MA in Contemporary Performance Making at Brunel University in 2009. Peake has collaborated with filmmakers, choreographers and other artists and performed internationally and across the UK. Recent institutional performances include Factual Actual: Ensemble, a commission that toured Southwark Park Galleries, London, The Towner, Eastbourne and Fruitmarket, Edinburgh in 2023 and 2024; Voicings, performed as part of Rich Mix at the Barbican, London in 2022; and CRUDE CARE, commissioned for the British Art Show 9 in 2021. The artist lives and works in London.

Portrait of Florence Peake: Vice Polak

Florence Peake. Text by Rafa Barber Cortell. Visiting Curator, Launch Pad LaB, Spring 2025.

During my visit to Launch Pad LaB, I stepped into three very different studio environments, each shaped by a distinct artistic language, yet all quietly resonating with a shared attention to what is absent, intangible, or just out of reach. In the work of Florence Peake, Ana Gzirishvili, and ektor garcía, absence takes on a material presence — not as a void to be filled, but as something that leaves a mark, a trace. Whether through gestures of mourning, acts of transformation, or intimate forms of making, each artist finds ways to work with what cannot be fully grasped. Materials such as plaster, leather, and thread become vessels for memory — carriers of what’s missing, what’s felt, what resists being named.

When I visited Florence Peake during her residency at Launch Pad LaB, I stepped into a studio inhabited by a particular kind of absence. Not a heavy or solemn atmosphere, but a sensitive space, filled with invisible presences and almost tangible absences. Florence was revisiting a line of inquiry that has shaped her practice for years: how to engage with what is no longer there, how to make the invisible weight of grief visible.

Her research during the residency stemmed from the project Your meaning not your materiality, presented at Leeds Art Gallery in 2025. This was a performance created in collaboration with students from the MA in Interdisciplinary Dance at the Northern School of Contemporary Dance. The piece explored the choreographic potential of the sculptural process of plaster casting, using the body as a tool to reflect on the materiality of what has ceased to be.

Plaster, with its ability to hold emptiness, was proposed as a metaphor for absence: a material that captures form, but points to something that has disappeared. The performance operated in that liminal space—hard to name, yet deeply present—where loss becomes almost tangible.

Some of the casts produced during that piece had travelled with Florence to Launchpad. Seeing them scattered throughout the studio, they struck me as fragments of an interrupted ritual. Over the course of the residency, they became starting points for new works. Florence approached them as if they were living relics: she looked at them, painted them, drew them, trying to decipher what they contain, what they withhold. She told me that, to her, each piece carries a semantic weight—almost as if it spoke a language we are only beginning to understand.

Among all the work she was developing, I was especially drawn to a series of small paintings depicting these sculptural objects. Someone who wouldn't see the original casts could struggle to define what they are seeing: bones? offerings? remnants of a forgotten civilisation? But it didn’t really matter what they were—what mattered was what they conveyed. There was something mystical in them, as if they were ancient icons touched by the sacred. I felt they represented a collective absence, a shared loss—hard to name, but easy to feel.

In another corner of the studio, two large-format paintings featured the same objects, now floating in an undefined space. They were no longer alone: they faced freer, almost gestural forms. I had the sense that these objects, once silent, were beginning to speak—expressing emotions like pain, rage, and frustration they could no longer contain. There was a kind of fractured sensuality in them, a desire with no body, a grief with no channel.

That was when I realised that grief itself was the true protagonist of all this. Invisible, yet ever-present. Like a phantom limb—you can’t see it, but it aches. And even if it feels incommunicable, Florence reminds us that grief, too, can be shared. It can be shaped, passed from one body to another. And perhaps in that act of transmission, in the attempt to hold what’s missing, we can find a new way of being together.