★★★★★
Florence Peake’s newest exhibition, Vitalities, has transformed HOME’s Main Gallery into a provocative space of transformation, exploring the boundaries between the corporeal and intangible, movement and distillation, abstraction and concretion, using the body as a site of expression to highlight collective and personal grief. At the heart of it is the question: What is left after the body is removed or perishes? She uses casting, drawings, paintings, sculptures, and performances to explore society’s attempt to cling to physical materiality in grief and adversity, with imprints and negative space capturing the invisible in a series of quasi-memento morris.
After a short introduction to the concept behind the exhibition, we were treated to a full-tour with detailed descriptions from Peake herself. The three spaces are connected moody sanguine paint and lighting that transitions from bright to brooding and intimate.
She describes the gallery as a culmination of two years of communal grief, holding a range of mixed media projects created in collaboration with studio assistants, professional dancers, and queer-identifying Mancunians. Each piece is static yet imbued with a ghostly energy, with negatives, casts and moulds leaving fragmented shells of bodies, each performer leaving their mark on the sculptures, both physically and emotionally.
Her paper projects are jagged with scratches and abstract explosions of colours melding with surreal anatomical forms. ‘Scratching in the Dark’ is a sorrowful time capsule, distilling a moment of potent emotion into one free-flowing piece. The ‘Double Acts’ series is more expressive, with bold cacophonies emerging from melancholic bodies, shapeless souls bursting from their chalk forms.
Her still-life oil painting study of the ‘Vitalities’ sculpture is another investigation into materiality, its thick brushstrokes and scratches canvas marks imprinting the shape in the same way we imprint emotions and memories onto cherished belongings.
I particularly appreciated the inversion of traditional life drawing in her work, often using vague shapes in her drawings while creating intricate negative moulds (i.e. ‘Vitalities’ & ‘Casting Ghosts’), both capturing ghostly presences. There’s also something fascinating in the dilution of form seen across her art, hands transformed into plaster and bronze, then painted or scrawled into new pieces. Even her expansive ceiling piece, ‘Your Meaning Not Your Materiality’, is repurposed art, its original form fading into obscurity.
Peake’s larger sculptural pieces are poetically haunting, pewter, plaster, and concrete body casts standing the test of time. There’s certainly a solemnity to these fossilised snapshots of time, effectively creating a gallery of modern relics and semi-visible ‘Tableau’ ghosts. Their hollow shells are inspired by connection and support but also take on a more sinister feeling with their resemblance to cloaked figures of death.
The centrepiece of the exhibition is an array of totems, created by pouring plaster between participants, solidifying the space between them as while thinking about loss and tragedies, in a sense cementing that emotional connection. The structures are irregular with cavities, fingerprints, faces, shoelaces, and numerous marks from textiles and skin crafting fascinating amalgamations.
Mixed in is an amusing set of cast dumbbells with synthetic hair pay homage to ageing, the menopause, and the attempt to optimise and capitalise on unachievable standards of beauty and health. She also contemplates the concept of erasure through several dance activations, where one performer will mark the walls in protest before another erases, evoking the vitality of expression and the oppression of the voice.
Ultimately, Peake’s exhibition is palpable and affecting with an incredible range in scale and material. Her fascination with the transition between life, death, and the residual traces of the human form culminate in a striking series of thought-provoking and emotionally charged pieces, each combining the movement and passion of performance art with traditional paint and sculpture work.
Florence Peake: Vitalities runs at HOME (Gallery) until January 31 2027.
