REMAKE’ is a continuously-moving work which playfully references the historical legacy of seminal minimalist sculpture. The piece is comprised of six performers who use wood to frame and reframe a space in acts of spontaneous choreography. ‘REMAKE’ forms part of Peake’s longer work MAKE previously performed at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park and BALTIC, Newcastle. A second performance, Valediction (2009) is a visual symphony combining writing, drawing and movement. The artist invites the viewing audience to witness “a death” and devises an intimate performance that extracts a moment to explore it through a bodily, dynamic and arresting meditation on the fragility of existence. Loosened from its traditional limitations, Peake uses the medium of dance to take on a sculptural dimension, “another body in the room” as Peake explains, with the performers’ gestures forcing and redirecting viewers into different areas of the space, determining the audience’s own movements. MAKE and REMAKE expose the actions and gestures behind sculptural product,” Peake explains. “It takes the duration of the piece for the performers to make a large-scale sculpture in the piece. Through choreographed and synchronised acts, a monolithic form is erected.”
“I am interested in exposing the task force of people required to make a piece of work and the similarities of the production process to theatre. The making of the work gave me an insight into how people perceive the activity of sculpture-making and presentation.”
Florence Peake is a London-based artist whose practice uses drawing, painting and sculpture combined with found objects in relationship to the moving body. Site and audience, wit and humour are key in her work. Recent work includes the ensemble work MAKE, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, touring to the BALTIC MILL and V22, the solo show chorus: swell the thickening surface of at TINTYPE gallery and ‘40’ for LUPA, Paper Portraits, National Portrait Gallery,Valediction, National Review of Live Art. She currently lectures at Coventry University and Surrey University and is an Artsadmin Associate Artist 2012-14
In October 2013 Florence Peake performed REMAKE, a three-hour 6-person durational performance as part of Open Heart Surgery in London.