A major interdisciplinary installation by internationally renowned choreographer & visual artist Florence Peake is to tour to Fruitmarket, Edinburgh and Towner Eastbourne. Peake will present a monumental painting installation using her distinctive gestural, movement-marking techniques and a series of performances.
FACTUAL ACTUAL: Ensemble is co-commissioned by Southwark Park Galleries, London and Towner Eastbourne, in partnership with Fruitmarket, Edinburgh. The exhibition tours to Fruitmarket 21 – 29 October 2023 and Towner Eastbourne in May 2024. Performances will take place at Fruitmarket at 11am and 2pm on Saturday 21 and Sunday 22 October.
Re-interpreting and expanding on a performance at the National Gallery in 2021, FACTUAL ACTUAL presents seven towering paintings on unstretched canvases that levitate above a reflective dance floor. The canvases will be draped like carcasses, waiting to be animated. Five dancers using a rig and pulley system will hoist, lower, collapse, fold and drag the paintings throughout the performances. Shifting between flat and sculptural forms, the paintings create a cacophony of sound, a sea-like sonic soundscape live in the gallery.
A 45m long, floor-to-ceiling frieze-style painting, Ensemble, envelops the gallery’s walls and the viewer at Towner Eastbourne. Respected for her queer approach and non hierarchical process, Peake often works with a multitude of collaborators. This new painting was created through a series of workshops held at Southwark Park Galleries in November 2022. Working with some of Southwark Park Galleries’ regular community groups – over 55s, young people and families – participants were invited to mark the canvas with Peake through their collective movements, which Peake then further developed in her studio over a period of three months.
Known for her often radical and joyfully irreverent work, Peake’s exhibition will interrogate what a painting can be, resisting a classical tradition and the idea of the white cube space as the static frame. Painting is brought vividly to life through the physical movement of the body and its chaotic relationship to material objects.
My performance practice will often take the methodologies, gestures and actions of artmaking as a subject and material for the generation of the performance work. With FACTUAL ACTUAL: Ensemble I want to take some of this thinking in relation to the actions behind the surface of painting. ~ Florence Peake