Arbroath, Scotland
In “Your Meaning Not Your Materiality (YMNYM)” (on view through October 4, 2026), Florence Peake presents a new series of fugitive, fragile, and strongly emotive sculptures. One installment in an evolving sculpture/performance project, with additional presentations at HOME in Manchester, theCOLAB in London, Lafayette Anticipations in Paris, and Rønnebæksholm, Denmark, in 2027, the “Vitalities,” as Peake calls them, are the result of a month-long residency at Hospitalfield in 2024, during which she experimented with casting, drawing, and performance. Placed throughout the historic house and gardens, these abstract forms of various sizes and materials make for strange and compelling encounters.
A visual artist, dancer, and choreographer, Peake frequently associates the making of art with technical processes, which then become subject, metaphor, and source for her works. In this case, she animated the history of Western casting methods as a means to explore loss and the desire to hold on to the intangible, asking what remains when the body or physical form is gone.
The evocative forms of the “Vitalities,” which lend materiality to absence, gain power from the process behind them. Collaborating with performers from the Scottish Dance Theatre and with members of the Hospitalfield community, Peake used different forms of casting to capture the fugitive negative spaces around, between, and beyond bodies and make them physical. She refers to these works as “Vitalities” for good reason. Grasping at, or holding on to, material or memory can be a frantic act of desperation in the midst of grief. In giving form to loss, Peake holds space for grief—personal, as well as collective. The embodied “Vitalities” slacken emotional turmoil and enable a gentler pace, a more tender touch and, perhaps, a growing acceptance. The Sisters, a plaster cast of the space between the bodies of sisters Lizzie and Kelly McWilliam, made during the course of a conversation about losses they had recently experienced, is particularly moving. Pieces of broken, discarded stonework from the historic site act as an informal plinth for this residual sculpture, which still retains clothing remnants.
Elsewhere, large-scale casts created in other materials take the form of shell-like sculptures placed directly on the ground that invite visitors to sit or rest upon them, held in the space created by another body. Additional white plaster forms are mounted in different spots around the boundary walls of the apothecary garden, where they appear as haunting presences in ambiguous relationship with the structure. Seven or eight additional small plaster casts adhere to the wall above a garden bench, where friends or lovers might sit. On closer inspection, they reveal themselves as the negative space of grasping hands and fingers. Here, grief and absence are reconstituted as a vital energy. Within the house, three similar grasping sculptures are augmented with positive casts in bronze that slip into the skins of the plaster negatives. This is perhaps how we hold on to our ghosts and exorcise our pain, eventually.
Hospitalfield will host a public performance of a new collaborative work, created by Florence Peake and Scotland’s premiere contemporary dance company, Scottish Dance Theatre, on August 16, 2026. “Your Meaning Not Your Materiality (YMNYM)” opens at HOME in Manchester on October 9, 2026.
