Florence Peake's performance of painting in FACTUAL ACTUAL: Ensemble
The multi-hyphenate artist's latest performance piece explores the very act of painting itself
By
Sam Kan
May 17, 2023
They unroll their boiler suit to their waist, revealing their bare torso, and begin to dance slowly across the canvas. Three other performers buzz around them: one holds up pages of ‘script’ for them to read aloud (a fourth performer hurriedly produces these scripts by copying out lines from a pile of books), the second holds the mic and the third begins to paint their naked torso with rubbing, dripping, splatting, flicking. It’s effortful for them all to coordinate and keep this exercise going, particularly for the painted dancer whose voice is breathy with exertion and sometimes winces as the paint hits their skin.
This performance is half of Florence Peake’s Factual Actual: Ensemble, which unravels across both Southwark Park Galleries. ‘Factual Actual’ is scheduled to repeat on several dates throughout the exhibition run, with an hour and a half duration: a performative exploration of painting as a physical process. The piece starts with the performers manipulating a collection of painted canvas sheets through the gallery: dragging, layering, lifting them, cloaking their own bodies with them. The canvases are sometimes attached to winches hanging from the rafters and hoisted upwards. There is another figure creeping through the space, their body disguised with abstractedly painted cut-outs. Performers create a soundscape with a looping mic and the noise of their actions. The canvases are then laid out, painted side down, and the participants pose across their surfaces, becoming the paintings themselves. Another performer adorns their body with bare canvas frames, transforming their figure with these wooden skeletons into something monstrous. Then, finally, the body-painting collective act that serves as the climax to the work.
Everything is about surfaces: visitors are asked to mask their shoes with plastic covers to protect the white-vinyl floor; the canvas sheets are malleable planes that are collaged together to create new images; the performer’s skin in the final act becomes a surface. In the second half of the exhibition at the Lake gallery, canvas scrawled with figures and limbs and splodges, is hung floor to ceiling, draped in the corners like folding curtains. The canvas forms an actual curtain over the doorway, so that to enter you must push back the fabric - if everything is surface, it’s all about looking beneath it. The performers shroud themselves with the canvas, lift it up, flip it over, expose its raw, unpainted side. Peake is inviting us behind the veil, making us look beneath the surface of painting. One performer pulls a sheet over my head as I’m watching, and we sit there for a while together.
What does Peake show us behind the scenes? Something of the painter’s physical creative process. The performers are focussed, concentrated, even concerned; they’re planning, working something out like a painter before their canvas. Layered into the soundscape are sighs and gasps, of creative pleasure, or exhaustion. For a time, the canvases are piled into heaps, like balls of scrunched up paper discarded by an artist while making. This is long, laborious work. Factual Actual presents the labour of creativity; the labour in making meaning. When moving the canvases, the performers wear gloves with gripping palms and smock-like costumes that evoke the uniform of an industrial labourer; later they change into similarly suggestive boiler suits. The winches signify mechanised labour, on a big scale. Notably, all the participants appear to be non-male identifying: the creative process, as presented here, isn’t a solo male genius being struck by a moment of inspiration, but a collective, arduous, inclusive exercise.
In making evident the labour involved in creativity, Peake also, perhaps unwittingly, exposes the labour involved in performing: another veil lifted. The work undertaken by the performers in performing the piece is long and materially unproductive. The art historian Claire Bishop has observed how performance art itself has become ‘industrialised’ and reliant upon ‘neoliberal labour practices such as precarious short-term contracts, outsourcing, and affective labour.’ Indeed, this staging of the creative process is almost an illustration of Bishop’s analysis that ‘the basis of labour is no longer the production of a commodity as end-product… but is a communicational act, designed for an audience’: creative process as spectacle. It’s unclear if Peake intended to critique such spectacle through, at times, recreating one - at the very least, the work reads as a comment on how creating isn’t always simple work.
Across the surfaces, and undertaking the labour, are the performers’ bodies. Just as the painted performer’s body becomes the centre of the action, it is the relationship between bodies and paint that is central to Peake’s show. The canvases are painted with bodies, when hoisted up they hang like carcasses. The performers’ bodies pose as living paintings, their twisting forms appear to be instantly captured on the canvases’ surfaces. Through representing the labour in painting, Peake shows that it is fundamentally related to the body: every brushstroke is a mark left by a body. This, of course, isn’t the first exploration of the relationship between body and paint. The performer’s painted-blue naked torso at the end is immediately reminiscent of Yves Klein’s blue body prints; the performer throwing paint reminiscent of Pollock. The staging of the creative process isn’t new either – think of Robert Rauschenberg painting live in performances of Story (1963). In this sense, Peake’s consideration of the history her work is entering into feels slightly fleeting and superficial, like the stack of books on painting tossed in a pile, from which scripts are made.
Despite Factual Actual not always feeling original in its exploration of painting, Peake has produced a performance that is a thought-provoking meditation on creative processes. The choreography of bodies, both those of the dancers and those painted across canvas, is beautiful and a pleasure to observe.
Florence Peake - Factual Actual: Ensemble is showing at Southwark Park Galleries until 2nd July.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
They unroll their boiler suit to their waist, revealing their bare torso, and begin to dance slowly across the canvas. Three other performers buzz around them: one holds up pages of ‘script’ for them to read aloud (a fourth performer hurriedly produces these scripts by copying out lines from a pile of books), the second holds the mic and the third begins to paint their naked torso with rubbing, dripping, splatting, flicking. It’s effortful for them all to coordinate and keep this exercise going, particularly for the painted dancer whose voice is breathy with exertion and sometimes winces as the paint hits their skin.
This performance is half of Florence Peake’s Factual Actual: Ensemble, which unravels across both Southwark Park Galleries. ‘Factual Actual’ is scheduled to repeat on several dates throughout the exhibition run, with an hour and a half duration: a performative exploration of painting as a physical process. The piece starts with the performers manipulating a collection of painted canvas sheets through the gallery: dragging, layering, lifting them, cloaking their own bodies with them. The canvases are sometimes attached to winches hanging from the rafters and hoisted upwards. There is another figure creeping through the space, their body disguised with abstractedly painted cut-outs. Performers create a soundscape with a looping mic and the noise of their actions. The canvases are then laid out, painted side down, and the participants pose across their surfaces, becoming the paintings themselves. Another performer adorns their body with bare canvas frames, transforming their figure with these wooden skeletons into something monstrous. Then, finally, the body-painting collective act that serves as the climax to the work.
Everything is about surfaces: visitors are asked to mask their shoes with plastic covers to protect the white-vinyl floor; the canvas sheets are malleable planes that are collaged together to create new images; the performer’s skin in the final act becomes a surface. In the second half of the exhibition at the Lake gallery, canvas scrawled with figures and limbs and splodges, is hung floor to ceiling, draped in the corners like folding curtains. The canvas forms an actual curtain over the doorway, so that to enter you must push back the fabric - if everything is surface, it’s all about looking beneath it. The performers shroud themselves with the canvas, lift it up, flip it over, expose its raw, unpainted side. Peake is inviting us behind the veil, making us look beneath the surface of painting. One performer pulls a sheet over my head as I’m watching, and we sit there for a while together.
What does Peake show us behind the scenes? Something of the painter’s physical creative process. The performers are focussed, concentrated, even concerned; they’re planning, working something out like a painter before their canvas. Layered into the soundscape are sighs and gasps, of creative pleasure, or exhaustion. For a time, the canvases are piled into heaps, like balls of scrunched up paper discarded by an artist while making. This is long, laborious work. Factual Actual presents the labour of creativity; the labour in making meaning. When moving the canvases, the performers wear gloves with gripping palms and smock-like costumes that evoke the uniform of an industrial labourer; later they change into similarly suggestive boiler suits. The winches signify mechanised labour, on a big scale. Notably, all the participants appear to be non-male identifying: the creative process, as presented here, isn’t a solo male genius being struck by a moment of inspiration, but a collective, arduous, inclusive exercise.
In making evident the labour involved in creativity, Peake also, perhaps unwittingly, exposes the labour involved in performing: another veil lifted. The work undertaken by the performers in performing the piece is long and materially unproductive. The art historian Claire Bishop has observed how performance art itself has become ‘industrialised’ and reliant upon ‘neoliberal labour practices such as precarious short-term contracts, outsourcing, and affective labour.’ Indeed, this staging of the creative process is almost an illustration of Bishop’s analysis that ‘the basis of labour is no longer the production of a commodity as end-product… but is a communicational act, designed for an audience’: creative process as spectacle. It’s unclear if Peake intended to critique such spectacle through, at times, recreating one - at the very least, the work reads as a comment on how creating isn’t always simple work.
Across the surfaces, and undertaking the labour, are the performers’ bodies. Just as the painted performer’s body becomes the centre of the action, it is the relationship between bodies and paint that is central to Peake’s show. The canvases are painted with bodies, when hoisted up they hang like carcasses. The performers’ bodies pose as living paintings, their twisting forms appear to be instantly captured on the canvases’ surfaces. Through representing the labour in painting, Peake shows that it is fundamentally related to the body: every brushstroke is a mark left by a body. This, of course, isn’t the first exploration of the relationship between body and paint. The performer’s painted-blue naked torso at the end is immediately reminiscent of Yves Klein’s blue body prints; the performer throwing paint reminiscent of Pollock. The staging of the creative process isn’t new either – think of Robert Rauschenberg painting live in performances of Story (1963). In this sense, Peake’s consideration of the history her work is entering into feels slightly fleeting and superficial, like the stack of books on painting tossed in a pile, from which scripts are made.
Despite Factual Actual not always feeling original in its exploration of painting, Peake has produced a performance that is a thought-provoking meditation on creative processes. The choreography of bodies, both those of the dancers and those painted across canvas, is beautiful and a pleasure to observe.
Florence Peake - Factual Actual: Ensemble is showing at Southwark Park Galleries until 2nd July.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
They unroll their boiler suit to their waist, revealing their bare torso, and begin to dance slowly across the canvas. Three other performers buzz around them: one holds up pages of ‘script’ for them to read aloud (a fourth performer hurriedly produces these scripts by copying out lines from a pile of books), the second holds the mic and the third begins to paint their naked torso with rubbing, dripping, splatting, flicking. It’s effortful for them all to coordinate and keep this exercise going, particularly for the painted dancer whose voice is breathy with exertion and sometimes winces as the paint hits their skin.
This performance is half of Florence Peake’s Factual Actual: Ensemble, which unravels across both Southwark Park Galleries. ‘Factual Actual’ is scheduled to repeat on several dates throughout the exhibition run, with an hour and a half duration: a performative exploration of painting as a physical process. The piece starts with the performers manipulating a collection of painted canvas sheets through the gallery: dragging, layering, lifting them, cloaking their own bodies with them. The canvases are sometimes attached to winches hanging from the rafters and hoisted upwards. There is another figure creeping through the space, their body disguised with abstractedly painted cut-outs. Performers create a soundscape with a looping mic and the noise of their actions. The canvases are then laid out, painted side down, and the participants pose across their surfaces, becoming the paintings themselves. Another performer adorns their body with bare canvas frames, transforming their figure with these wooden skeletons into something monstrous. Then, finally, the body-painting collective act that serves as the climax to the work.
Everything is about surfaces: visitors are asked to mask their shoes with plastic covers to protect the white-vinyl floor; the canvas sheets are malleable planes that are collaged together to create new images; the performer’s skin in the final act becomes a surface. In the second half of the exhibition at the Lake gallery, canvas scrawled with figures and limbs and splodges, is hung floor to ceiling, draped in the corners like folding curtains. The canvas forms an actual curtain over the doorway, so that to enter you must push back the fabric - if everything is surface, it’s all about looking beneath it. The performers shroud themselves with the canvas, lift it up, flip it over, expose its raw, unpainted side. Peake is inviting us behind the veil, making us look beneath the surface of painting. One performer pulls a sheet over my head as I’m watching, and we sit there for a while together.
What does Peake show us behind the scenes? Something of the painter’s physical creative process. The performers are focussed, concentrated, even concerned; they’re planning, working something out like a painter before their canvas. Layered into the soundscape are sighs and gasps, of creative pleasure, or exhaustion. For a time, the canvases are piled into heaps, like balls of scrunched up paper discarded by an artist while making. This is long, laborious work. Factual Actual presents the labour of creativity; the labour in making meaning. When moving the canvases, the performers wear gloves with gripping palms and smock-like costumes that evoke the uniform of an industrial labourer; later they change into similarly suggestive boiler suits. The winches signify mechanised labour, on a big scale. Notably, all the participants appear to be non-male identifying: the creative process, as presented here, isn’t a solo male genius being struck by a moment of inspiration, but a collective, arduous, inclusive exercise.
In making evident the labour involved in creativity, Peake also, perhaps unwittingly, exposes the labour involved in performing: another veil lifted. The work undertaken by the performers in performing the piece is long and materially unproductive. The art historian Claire Bishop has observed how performance art itself has become ‘industrialised’ and reliant upon ‘neoliberal labour practices such as precarious short-term contracts, outsourcing, and affective labour.’ Indeed, this staging of the creative process is almost an illustration of Bishop’s analysis that ‘the basis of labour is no longer the production of a commodity as end-product… but is a communicational act, designed for an audience’: creative process as spectacle. It’s unclear if Peake intended to critique such spectacle through, at times, recreating one - at the very least, the work reads as a comment on how creating isn’t always simple work.
Across the surfaces, and undertaking the labour, are the performers’ bodies. Just as the painted performer’s body becomes the centre of the action, it is the relationship between bodies and paint that is central to Peake’s show. The canvases are painted with bodies, when hoisted up they hang like carcasses. The performers’ bodies pose as living paintings, their twisting forms appear to be instantly captured on the canvases’ surfaces. Through representing the labour in painting, Peake shows that it is fundamentally related to the body: every brushstroke is a mark left by a body. This, of course, isn’t the first exploration of the relationship between body and paint. The performer’s painted-blue naked torso at the end is immediately reminiscent of Yves Klein’s blue body prints; the performer throwing paint reminiscent of Pollock. The staging of the creative process isn’t new either – think of Robert Rauschenberg painting live in performances of Story (1963). In this sense, Peake’s consideration of the history her work is entering into feels slightly fleeting and superficial, like the stack of books on painting tossed in a pile, from which scripts are made.
Despite Factual Actual not always feeling original in its exploration of painting, Peake has produced a performance that is a thought-provoking meditation on creative processes. The choreography of bodies, both those of the dancers and those painted across canvas, is beautiful and a pleasure to observe.
Florence Peake - Factual Actual: Ensemble is showing at Southwark Park Galleries until 2nd July.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
They unroll their boiler suit to their waist, revealing their bare torso, and begin to dance slowly across the canvas. Three other performers buzz around them: one holds up pages of ‘script’ for them to read aloud (a fourth performer hurriedly produces these scripts by copying out lines from a pile of books), the second holds the mic and the third begins to paint their naked torso with rubbing, dripping, splatting, flicking. It’s effortful for them all to coordinate and keep this exercise going, particularly for the painted dancer whose voice is breathy with exertion and sometimes winces as the paint hits their skin.
This performance is half of Florence Peake’s Factual Actual: Ensemble, which unravels across both Southwark Park Galleries. ‘Factual Actual’ is scheduled to repeat on several dates throughout the exhibition run, with an hour and a half duration: a performative exploration of painting as a physical process. The piece starts with the performers manipulating a collection of painted canvas sheets through the gallery: dragging, layering, lifting them, cloaking their own bodies with them. The canvases are sometimes attached to winches hanging from the rafters and hoisted upwards. There is another figure creeping through the space, their body disguised with abstractedly painted cut-outs. Performers create a soundscape with a looping mic and the noise of their actions. The canvases are then laid out, painted side down, and the participants pose across their surfaces, becoming the paintings themselves. Another performer adorns their body with bare canvas frames, transforming their figure with these wooden skeletons into something monstrous. Then, finally, the body-painting collective act that serves as the climax to the work.
Everything is about surfaces: visitors are asked to mask their shoes with plastic covers to protect the white-vinyl floor; the canvas sheets are malleable planes that are collaged together to create new images; the performer’s skin in the final act becomes a surface. In the second half of the exhibition at the Lake gallery, canvas scrawled with figures and limbs and splodges, is hung floor to ceiling, draped in the corners like folding curtains. The canvas forms an actual curtain over the doorway, so that to enter you must push back the fabric - if everything is surface, it’s all about looking beneath it. The performers shroud themselves with the canvas, lift it up, flip it over, expose its raw, unpainted side. Peake is inviting us behind the veil, making us look beneath the surface of painting. One performer pulls a sheet over my head as I’m watching, and we sit there for a while together.
What does Peake show us behind the scenes? Something of the painter’s physical creative process. The performers are focussed, concentrated, even concerned; they’re planning, working something out like a painter before their canvas. Layered into the soundscape are sighs and gasps, of creative pleasure, or exhaustion. For a time, the canvases are piled into heaps, like balls of scrunched up paper discarded by an artist while making. This is long, laborious work. Factual Actual presents the labour of creativity; the labour in making meaning. When moving the canvases, the performers wear gloves with gripping palms and smock-like costumes that evoke the uniform of an industrial labourer; later they change into similarly suggestive boiler suits. The winches signify mechanised labour, on a big scale. Notably, all the participants appear to be non-male identifying: the creative process, as presented here, isn’t a solo male genius being struck by a moment of inspiration, but a collective, arduous, inclusive exercise.
In making evident the labour involved in creativity, Peake also, perhaps unwittingly, exposes the labour involved in performing: another veil lifted. The work undertaken by the performers in performing the piece is long and materially unproductive. The art historian Claire Bishop has observed how performance art itself has become ‘industrialised’ and reliant upon ‘neoliberal labour practices such as precarious short-term contracts, outsourcing, and affective labour.’ Indeed, this staging of the creative process is almost an illustration of Bishop’s analysis that ‘the basis of labour is no longer the production of a commodity as end-product… but is a communicational act, designed for an audience’: creative process as spectacle. It’s unclear if Peake intended to critique such spectacle through, at times, recreating one - at the very least, the work reads as a comment on how creating isn’t always simple work.
Across the surfaces, and undertaking the labour, are the performers’ bodies. Just as the painted performer’s body becomes the centre of the action, it is the relationship between bodies and paint that is central to Peake’s show. The canvases are painted with bodies, when hoisted up they hang like carcasses. The performers’ bodies pose as living paintings, their twisting forms appear to be instantly captured on the canvases’ surfaces. Through representing the labour in painting, Peake shows that it is fundamentally related to the body: every brushstroke is a mark left by a body. This, of course, isn’t the first exploration of the relationship between body and paint. The performer’s painted-blue naked torso at the end is immediately reminiscent of Yves Klein’s blue body prints; the performer throwing paint reminiscent of Pollock. The staging of the creative process isn’t new either – think of Robert Rauschenberg painting live in performances of Story (1963). In this sense, Peake’s consideration of the history her work is entering into feels slightly fleeting and superficial, like the stack of books on painting tossed in a pile, from which scripts are made.
Despite Factual Actual not always feeling original in its exploration of painting, Peake has produced a performance that is a thought-provoking meditation on creative processes. The choreography of bodies, both those of the dancers and those painted across canvas, is beautiful and a pleasure to observe.
Florence Peake - Factual Actual: Ensemble is showing at Southwark Park Galleries until 2nd July.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
They unroll their boiler suit to their waist, revealing their bare torso, and begin to dance slowly across the canvas. Three other performers buzz around them: one holds up pages of ‘script’ for them to read aloud (a fourth performer hurriedly produces these scripts by copying out lines from a pile of books), the second holds the mic and the third begins to paint their naked torso with rubbing, dripping, splatting, flicking. It’s effortful for them all to coordinate and keep this exercise going, particularly for the painted dancer whose voice is breathy with exertion and sometimes winces as the paint hits their skin.
This performance is half of Florence Peake’s Factual Actual: Ensemble, which unravels across both Southwark Park Galleries. ‘Factual Actual’ is scheduled to repeat on several dates throughout the exhibition run, with an hour and a half duration: a performative exploration of painting as a physical process. The piece starts with the performers manipulating a collection of painted canvas sheets through the gallery: dragging, layering, lifting them, cloaking their own bodies with them. The canvases are sometimes attached to winches hanging from the rafters and hoisted upwards. There is another figure creeping through the space, their body disguised with abstractedly painted cut-outs. Performers create a soundscape with a looping mic and the noise of their actions. The canvases are then laid out, painted side down, and the participants pose across their surfaces, becoming the paintings themselves. Another performer adorns their body with bare canvas frames, transforming their figure with these wooden skeletons into something monstrous. Then, finally, the body-painting collective act that serves as the climax to the work.
Everything is about surfaces: visitors are asked to mask their shoes with plastic covers to protect the white-vinyl floor; the canvas sheets are malleable planes that are collaged together to create new images; the performer’s skin in the final act becomes a surface. In the second half of the exhibition at the Lake gallery, canvas scrawled with figures and limbs and splodges, is hung floor to ceiling, draped in the corners like folding curtains. The canvas forms an actual curtain over the doorway, so that to enter you must push back the fabric - if everything is surface, it’s all about looking beneath it. The performers shroud themselves with the canvas, lift it up, flip it over, expose its raw, unpainted side. Peake is inviting us behind the veil, making us look beneath the surface of painting. One performer pulls a sheet over my head as I’m watching, and we sit there for a while together.
What does Peake show us behind the scenes? Something of the painter’s physical creative process. The performers are focussed, concentrated, even concerned; they’re planning, working something out like a painter before their canvas. Layered into the soundscape are sighs and gasps, of creative pleasure, or exhaustion. For a time, the canvases are piled into heaps, like balls of scrunched up paper discarded by an artist while making. This is long, laborious work. Factual Actual presents the labour of creativity; the labour in making meaning. When moving the canvases, the performers wear gloves with gripping palms and smock-like costumes that evoke the uniform of an industrial labourer; later they change into similarly suggestive boiler suits. The winches signify mechanised labour, on a big scale. Notably, all the participants appear to be non-male identifying: the creative process, as presented here, isn’t a solo male genius being struck by a moment of inspiration, but a collective, arduous, inclusive exercise.
In making evident the labour involved in creativity, Peake also, perhaps unwittingly, exposes the labour involved in performing: another veil lifted. The work undertaken by the performers in performing the piece is long and materially unproductive. The art historian Claire Bishop has observed how performance art itself has become ‘industrialised’ and reliant upon ‘neoliberal labour practices such as precarious short-term contracts, outsourcing, and affective labour.’ Indeed, this staging of the creative process is almost an illustration of Bishop’s analysis that ‘the basis of labour is no longer the production of a commodity as end-product… but is a communicational act, designed for an audience’: creative process as spectacle. It’s unclear if Peake intended to critique such spectacle through, at times, recreating one - at the very least, the work reads as a comment on how creating isn’t always simple work.
Across the surfaces, and undertaking the labour, are the performers’ bodies. Just as the painted performer’s body becomes the centre of the action, it is the relationship between bodies and paint that is central to Peake’s show. The canvases are painted with bodies, when hoisted up they hang like carcasses. The performers’ bodies pose as living paintings, their twisting forms appear to be instantly captured on the canvases’ surfaces. Through representing the labour in painting, Peake shows that it is fundamentally related to the body: every brushstroke is a mark left by a body. This, of course, isn’t the first exploration of the relationship between body and paint. The performer’s painted-blue naked torso at the end is immediately reminiscent of Yves Klein’s blue body prints; the performer throwing paint reminiscent of Pollock. The staging of the creative process isn’t new either – think of Robert Rauschenberg painting live in performances of Story (1963). In this sense, Peake’s consideration of the history her work is entering into feels slightly fleeting and superficial, like the stack of books on painting tossed in a pile, from which scripts are made.
Despite Factual Actual not always feeling original in its exploration of painting, Peake has produced a performance that is a thought-provoking meditation on creative processes. The choreography of bodies, both those of the dancers and those painted across canvas, is beautiful and a pleasure to observe.
Florence Peake - Factual Actual: Ensemble is showing at Southwark Park Galleries until 2nd July.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
They unroll their boiler suit to their waist, revealing their bare torso, and begin to dance slowly across the canvas. Three other performers buzz around them: one holds up pages of ‘script’ for them to read aloud (a fourth performer hurriedly produces these scripts by copying out lines from a pile of books), the second holds the mic and the third begins to paint their naked torso with rubbing, dripping, splatting, flicking. It’s effortful for them all to coordinate and keep this exercise going, particularly for the painted dancer whose voice is breathy with exertion and sometimes winces as the paint hits their skin.
This performance is half of Florence Peake’s Factual Actual: Ensemble, which unravels across both Southwark Park Galleries. ‘Factual Actual’ is scheduled to repeat on several dates throughout the exhibition run, with an hour and a half duration: a performative exploration of painting as a physical process. The piece starts with the performers manipulating a collection of painted canvas sheets through the gallery: dragging, layering, lifting them, cloaking their own bodies with them. The canvases are sometimes attached to winches hanging from the rafters and hoisted upwards. There is another figure creeping through the space, their body disguised with abstractedly painted cut-outs. Performers create a soundscape with a looping mic and the noise of their actions. The canvases are then laid out, painted side down, and the participants pose across their surfaces, becoming the paintings themselves. Another performer adorns their body with bare canvas frames, transforming their figure with these wooden skeletons into something monstrous. Then, finally, the body-painting collective act that serves as the climax to the work.
Everything is about surfaces: visitors are asked to mask their shoes with plastic covers to protect the white-vinyl floor; the canvas sheets are malleable planes that are collaged together to create new images; the performer’s skin in the final act becomes a surface. In the second half of the exhibition at the Lake gallery, canvas scrawled with figures and limbs and splodges, is hung floor to ceiling, draped in the corners like folding curtains. The canvas forms an actual curtain over the doorway, so that to enter you must push back the fabric - if everything is surface, it’s all about looking beneath it. The performers shroud themselves with the canvas, lift it up, flip it over, expose its raw, unpainted side. Peake is inviting us behind the veil, making us look beneath the surface of painting. One performer pulls a sheet over my head as I’m watching, and we sit there for a while together.
What does Peake show us behind the scenes? Something of the painter’s physical creative process. The performers are focussed, concentrated, even concerned; they’re planning, working something out like a painter before their canvas. Layered into the soundscape are sighs and gasps, of creative pleasure, or exhaustion. For a time, the canvases are piled into heaps, like balls of scrunched up paper discarded by an artist while making. This is long, laborious work. Factual Actual presents the labour of creativity; the labour in making meaning. When moving the canvases, the performers wear gloves with gripping palms and smock-like costumes that evoke the uniform of an industrial labourer; later they change into similarly suggestive boiler suits. The winches signify mechanised labour, on a big scale. Notably, all the participants appear to be non-male identifying: the creative process, as presented here, isn’t a solo male genius being struck by a moment of inspiration, but a collective, arduous, inclusive exercise.
In making evident the labour involved in creativity, Peake also, perhaps unwittingly, exposes the labour involved in performing: another veil lifted. The work undertaken by the performers in performing the piece is long and materially unproductive. The art historian Claire Bishop has observed how performance art itself has become ‘industrialised’ and reliant upon ‘neoliberal labour practices such as precarious short-term contracts, outsourcing, and affective labour.’ Indeed, this staging of the creative process is almost an illustration of Bishop’s analysis that ‘the basis of labour is no longer the production of a commodity as end-product… but is a communicational act, designed for an audience’: creative process as spectacle. It’s unclear if Peake intended to critique such spectacle through, at times, recreating one - at the very least, the work reads as a comment on how creating isn’t always simple work.
Across the surfaces, and undertaking the labour, are the performers’ bodies. Just as the painted performer’s body becomes the centre of the action, it is the relationship between bodies and paint that is central to Peake’s show. The canvases are painted with bodies, when hoisted up they hang like carcasses. The performers’ bodies pose as living paintings, their twisting forms appear to be instantly captured on the canvases’ surfaces. Through representing the labour in painting, Peake shows that it is fundamentally related to the body: every brushstroke is a mark left by a body. This, of course, isn’t the first exploration of the relationship between body and paint. The performer’s painted-blue naked torso at the end is immediately reminiscent of Yves Klein’s blue body prints; the performer throwing paint reminiscent of Pollock. The staging of the creative process isn’t new either – think of Robert Rauschenberg painting live in performances of Story (1963). In this sense, Peake’s consideration of the history her work is entering into feels slightly fleeting and superficial, like the stack of books on painting tossed in a pile, from which scripts are made.
Despite Factual Actual not always feeling original in its exploration of painting, Peake has produced a performance that is a thought-provoking meditation on creative processes. The choreography of bodies, both those of the dancers and those painted across canvas, is beautiful and a pleasure to observe.
Florence Peake - Factual Actual: Ensemble is showing at Southwark Park Galleries until 2nd July.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
They unroll their boiler suit to their waist, revealing their bare torso, and begin to dance slowly across the canvas. Three other performers buzz around them: one holds up pages of ‘script’ for them to read aloud (a fourth performer hurriedly produces these scripts by copying out lines from a pile of books), the second holds the mic and the third begins to paint their naked torso with rubbing, dripping, splatting, flicking. It’s effortful for them all to coordinate and keep this exercise going, particularly for the painted dancer whose voice is breathy with exertion and sometimes winces as the paint hits their skin.
This performance is half of Florence Peake’s Factual Actual: Ensemble, which unravels across both Southwark Park Galleries. ‘Factual Actual’ is scheduled to repeat on several dates throughout the exhibition run, with an hour and a half duration: a performative exploration of painting as a physical process. The piece starts with the performers manipulating a collection of painted canvas sheets through the gallery: dragging, layering, lifting them, cloaking their own bodies with them. The canvases are sometimes attached to winches hanging from the rafters and hoisted upwards. There is another figure creeping through the space, their body disguised with abstractedly painted cut-outs. Performers create a soundscape with a looping mic and the noise of their actions. The canvases are then laid out, painted side down, and the participants pose across their surfaces, becoming the paintings themselves. Another performer adorns their body with bare canvas frames, transforming their figure with these wooden skeletons into something monstrous. Then, finally, the body-painting collective act that serves as the climax to the work.
Everything is about surfaces: visitors are asked to mask their shoes with plastic covers to protect the white-vinyl floor; the canvas sheets are malleable planes that are collaged together to create new images; the performer’s skin in the final act becomes a surface. In the second half of the exhibition at the Lake gallery, canvas scrawled with figures and limbs and splodges, is hung floor to ceiling, draped in the corners like folding curtains. The canvas forms an actual curtain over the doorway, so that to enter you must push back the fabric - if everything is surface, it’s all about looking beneath it. The performers shroud themselves with the canvas, lift it up, flip it over, expose its raw, unpainted side. Peake is inviting us behind the veil, making us look beneath the surface of painting. One performer pulls a sheet over my head as I’m watching, and we sit there for a while together.
What does Peake show us behind the scenes? Something of the painter’s physical creative process. The performers are focussed, concentrated, even concerned; they’re planning, working something out like a painter before their canvas. Layered into the soundscape are sighs and gasps, of creative pleasure, or exhaustion. For a time, the canvases are piled into heaps, like balls of scrunched up paper discarded by an artist while making. This is long, laborious work. Factual Actual presents the labour of creativity; the labour in making meaning. When moving the canvases, the performers wear gloves with gripping palms and smock-like costumes that evoke the uniform of an industrial labourer; later they change into similarly suggestive boiler suits. The winches signify mechanised labour, on a big scale. Notably, all the participants appear to be non-male identifying: the creative process, as presented here, isn’t a solo male genius being struck by a moment of inspiration, but a collective, arduous, inclusive exercise.
In making evident the labour involved in creativity, Peake also, perhaps unwittingly, exposes the labour involved in performing: another veil lifted. The work undertaken by the performers in performing the piece is long and materially unproductive. The art historian Claire Bishop has observed how performance art itself has become ‘industrialised’ and reliant upon ‘neoliberal labour practices such as precarious short-term contracts, outsourcing, and affective labour.’ Indeed, this staging of the creative process is almost an illustration of Bishop’s analysis that ‘the basis of labour is no longer the production of a commodity as end-product… but is a communicational act, designed for an audience’: creative process as spectacle. It’s unclear if Peake intended to critique such spectacle through, at times, recreating one - at the very least, the work reads as a comment on how creating isn’t always simple work.
Across the surfaces, and undertaking the labour, are the performers’ bodies. Just as the painted performer’s body becomes the centre of the action, it is the relationship between bodies and paint that is central to Peake’s show. The canvases are painted with bodies, when hoisted up they hang like carcasses. The performers’ bodies pose as living paintings, their twisting forms appear to be instantly captured on the canvases’ surfaces. Through representing the labour in painting, Peake shows that it is fundamentally related to the body: every brushstroke is a mark left by a body. This, of course, isn’t the first exploration of the relationship between body and paint. The performer’s painted-blue naked torso at the end is immediately reminiscent of Yves Klein’s blue body prints; the performer throwing paint reminiscent of Pollock. The staging of the creative process isn’t new either – think of Robert Rauschenberg painting live in performances of Story (1963). In this sense, Peake’s consideration of the history her work is entering into feels slightly fleeting and superficial, like the stack of books on painting tossed in a pile, from which scripts are made.
Despite Factual Actual not always feeling original in its exploration of painting, Peake has produced a performance that is a thought-provoking meditation on creative processes. The choreography of bodies, both those of the dancers and those painted across canvas, is beautiful and a pleasure to observe.
Florence Peake - Factual Actual: Ensemble is showing at Southwark Park Galleries until 2nd July.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
They unroll their boiler suit to their waist, revealing their bare torso, and begin to dance slowly across the canvas. Three other performers buzz around them: one holds up pages of ‘script’ for them to read aloud (a fourth performer hurriedly produces these scripts by copying out lines from a pile of books), the second holds the mic and the third begins to paint their naked torso with rubbing, dripping, splatting, flicking. It’s effortful for them all to coordinate and keep this exercise going, particularly for the painted dancer whose voice is breathy with exertion and sometimes winces as the paint hits their skin.
This performance is half of Florence Peake’s Factual Actual: Ensemble, which unravels across both Southwark Park Galleries. ‘Factual Actual’ is scheduled to repeat on several dates throughout the exhibition run, with an hour and a half duration: a performative exploration of painting as a physical process. The piece starts with the performers manipulating a collection of painted canvas sheets through the gallery: dragging, layering, lifting them, cloaking their own bodies with them. The canvases are sometimes attached to winches hanging from the rafters and hoisted upwards. There is another figure creeping through the space, their body disguised with abstractedly painted cut-outs. Performers create a soundscape with a looping mic and the noise of their actions. The canvases are then laid out, painted side down, and the participants pose across their surfaces, becoming the paintings themselves. Another performer adorns their body with bare canvas frames, transforming their figure with these wooden skeletons into something monstrous. Then, finally, the body-painting collective act that serves as the climax to the work.
Everything is about surfaces: visitors are asked to mask their shoes with plastic covers to protect the white-vinyl floor; the canvas sheets are malleable planes that are collaged together to create new images; the performer’s skin in the final act becomes a surface. In the second half of the exhibition at the Lake gallery, canvas scrawled with figures and limbs and splodges, is hung floor to ceiling, draped in the corners like folding curtains. The canvas forms an actual curtain over the doorway, so that to enter you must push back the fabric - if everything is surface, it’s all about looking beneath it. The performers shroud themselves with the canvas, lift it up, flip it over, expose its raw, unpainted side. Peake is inviting us behind the veil, making us look beneath the surface of painting. One performer pulls a sheet over my head as I’m watching, and we sit there for a while together.
What does Peake show us behind the scenes? Something of the painter’s physical creative process. The performers are focussed, concentrated, even concerned; they’re planning, working something out like a painter before their canvas. Layered into the soundscape are sighs and gasps, of creative pleasure, or exhaustion. For a time, the canvases are piled into heaps, like balls of scrunched up paper discarded by an artist while making. This is long, laborious work. Factual Actual presents the labour of creativity; the labour in making meaning. When moving the canvases, the performers wear gloves with gripping palms and smock-like costumes that evoke the uniform of an industrial labourer; later they change into similarly suggestive boiler suits. The winches signify mechanised labour, on a big scale. Notably, all the participants appear to be non-male identifying: the creative process, as presented here, isn’t a solo male genius being struck by a moment of inspiration, but a collective, arduous, inclusive exercise.
In making evident the labour involved in creativity, Peake also, perhaps unwittingly, exposes the labour involved in performing: another veil lifted. The work undertaken by the performers in performing the piece is long and materially unproductive. The art historian Claire Bishop has observed how performance art itself has become ‘industrialised’ and reliant upon ‘neoliberal labour practices such as precarious short-term contracts, outsourcing, and affective labour.’ Indeed, this staging of the creative process is almost an illustration of Bishop’s analysis that ‘the basis of labour is no longer the production of a commodity as end-product… but is a communicational act, designed for an audience’: creative process as spectacle. It’s unclear if Peake intended to critique such spectacle through, at times, recreating one - at the very least, the work reads as a comment on how creating isn’t always simple work.
Across the surfaces, and undertaking the labour, are the performers’ bodies. Just as the painted performer’s body becomes the centre of the action, it is the relationship between bodies and paint that is central to Peake’s show. The canvases are painted with bodies, when hoisted up they hang like carcasses. The performers’ bodies pose as living paintings, their twisting forms appear to be instantly captured on the canvases’ surfaces. Through representing the labour in painting, Peake shows that it is fundamentally related to the body: every brushstroke is a mark left by a body. This, of course, isn’t the first exploration of the relationship between body and paint. The performer’s painted-blue naked torso at the end is immediately reminiscent of Yves Klein’s blue body prints; the performer throwing paint reminiscent of Pollock. The staging of the creative process isn’t new either – think of Robert Rauschenberg painting live in performances of Story (1963). In this sense, Peake’s consideration of the history her work is entering into feels slightly fleeting and superficial, like the stack of books on painting tossed in a pile, from which scripts are made.
Despite Factual Actual not always feeling original in its exploration of painting, Peake has produced a performance that is a thought-provoking meditation on creative processes. The choreography of bodies, both those of the dancers and those painted across canvas, is beautiful and a pleasure to observe.
Florence Peake - Factual Actual: Ensemble is showing at Southwark Park Galleries until 2nd July.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
They unroll their boiler suit to their waist, revealing their bare torso, and begin to dance slowly across the canvas. Three other performers buzz around them: one holds up pages of ‘script’ for them to read aloud (a fourth performer hurriedly produces these scripts by copying out lines from a pile of books), the second holds the mic and the third begins to paint their naked torso with rubbing, dripping, splatting, flicking. It’s effortful for them all to coordinate and keep this exercise going, particularly for the painted dancer whose voice is breathy with exertion and sometimes winces as the paint hits their skin.
This performance is half of Florence Peake’s Factual Actual: Ensemble, which unravels across both Southwark Park Galleries. ‘Factual Actual’ is scheduled to repeat on several dates throughout the exhibition run, with an hour and a half duration: a performative exploration of painting as a physical process. The piece starts with the performers manipulating a collection of painted canvas sheets through the gallery: dragging, layering, lifting them, cloaking their own bodies with them. The canvases are sometimes attached to winches hanging from the rafters and hoisted upwards. There is another figure creeping through the space, their body disguised with abstractedly painted cut-outs. Performers create a soundscape with a looping mic and the noise of their actions. The canvases are then laid out, painted side down, and the participants pose across their surfaces, becoming the paintings themselves. Another performer adorns their body with bare canvas frames, transforming their figure with these wooden skeletons into something monstrous. Then, finally, the body-painting collective act that serves as the climax to the work.
Everything is about surfaces: visitors are asked to mask their shoes with plastic covers to protect the white-vinyl floor; the canvas sheets are malleable planes that are collaged together to create new images; the performer’s skin in the final act becomes a surface. In the second half of the exhibition at the Lake gallery, canvas scrawled with figures and limbs and splodges, is hung floor to ceiling, draped in the corners like folding curtains. The canvas forms an actual curtain over the doorway, so that to enter you must push back the fabric - if everything is surface, it’s all about looking beneath it. The performers shroud themselves with the canvas, lift it up, flip it over, expose its raw, unpainted side. Peake is inviting us behind the veil, making us look beneath the surface of painting. One performer pulls a sheet over my head as I’m watching, and we sit there for a while together.
What does Peake show us behind the scenes? Something of the painter’s physical creative process. The performers are focussed, concentrated, even concerned; they’re planning, working something out like a painter before their canvas. Layered into the soundscape are sighs and gasps, of creative pleasure, or exhaustion. For a time, the canvases are piled into heaps, like balls of scrunched up paper discarded by an artist while making. This is long, laborious work. Factual Actual presents the labour of creativity; the labour in making meaning. When moving the canvases, the performers wear gloves with gripping palms and smock-like costumes that evoke the uniform of an industrial labourer; later they change into similarly suggestive boiler suits. The winches signify mechanised labour, on a big scale. Notably, all the participants appear to be non-male identifying: the creative process, as presented here, isn’t a solo male genius being struck by a moment of inspiration, but a collective, arduous, inclusive exercise.
In making evident the labour involved in creativity, Peake also, perhaps unwittingly, exposes the labour involved in performing: another veil lifted. The work undertaken by the performers in performing the piece is long and materially unproductive. The art historian Claire Bishop has observed how performance art itself has become ‘industrialised’ and reliant upon ‘neoliberal labour practices such as precarious short-term contracts, outsourcing, and affective labour.’ Indeed, this staging of the creative process is almost an illustration of Bishop’s analysis that ‘the basis of labour is no longer the production of a commodity as end-product… but is a communicational act, designed for an audience’: creative process as spectacle. It’s unclear if Peake intended to critique such spectacle through, at times, recreating one - at the very least, the work reads as a comment on how creating isn’t always simple work.
Across the surfaces, and undertaking the labour, are the performers’ bodies. Just as the painted performer’s body becomes the centre of the action, it is the relationship between bodies and paint that is central to Peake’s show. The canvases are painted with bodies, when hoisted up they hang like carcasses. The performers’ bodies pose as living paintings, their twisting forms appear to be instantly captured on the canvases’ surfaces. Through representing the labour in painting, Peake shows that it is fundamentally related to the body: every brushstroke is a mark left by a body. This, of course, isn’t the first exploration of the relationship between body and paint. The performer’s painted-blue naked torso at the end is immediately reminiscent of Yves Klein’s blue body prints; the performer throwing paint reminiscent of Pollock. The staging of the creative process isn’t new either – think of Robert Rauschenberg painting live in performances of Story (1963). In this sense, Peake’s consideration of the history her work is entering into feels slightly fleeting and superficial, like the stack of books on painting tossed in a pile, from which scripts are made.
Despite Factual Actual not always feeling original in its exploration of painting, Peake has produced a performance that is a thought-provoking meditation on creative processes. The choreography of bodies, both those of the dancers and those painted across canvas, is beautiful and a pleasure to observe.
Florence Peake - Factual Actual: Ensemble is showing at Southwark Park Galleries until 2nd July.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
They unroll their boiler suit to their waist, revealing their bare torso, and begin to dance slowly across the canvas. Three other performers buzz around them: one holds up pages of ‘script’ for them to read aloud (a fourth performer hurriedly produces these scripts by copying out lines from a pile of books), the second holds the mic and the third begins to paint their naked torso with rubbing, dripping, splatting, flicking. It’s effortful for them all to coordinate and keep this exercise going, particularly for the painted dancer whose voice is breathy with exertion and sometimes winces as the paint hits their skin.
This performance is half of Florence Peake’s Factual Actual: Ensemble, which unravels across both Southwark Park Galleries. ‘Factual Actual’ is scheduled to repeat on several dates throughout the exhibition run, with an hour and a half duration: a performative exploration of painting as a physical process. The piece starts with the performers manipulating a collection of painted canvas sheets through the gallery: dragging, layering, lifting them, cloaking their own bodies with them. The canvases are sometimes attached to winches hanging from the rafters and hoisted upwards. There is another figure creeping through the space, their body disguised with abstractedly painted cut-outs. Performers create a soundscape with a looping mic and the noise of their actions. The canvases are then laid out, painted side down, and the participants pose across their surfaces, becoming the paintings themselves. Another performer adorns their body with bare canvas frames, transforming their figure with these wooden skeletons into something monstrous. Then, finally, the body-painting collective act that serves as the climax to the work.
Everything is about surfaces: visitors are asked to mask their shoes with plastic covers to protect the white-vinyl floor; the canvas sheets are malleable planes that are collaged together to create new images; the performer’s skin in the final act becomes a surface. In the second half of the exhibition at the Lake gallery, canvas scrawled with figures and limbs and splodges, is hung floor to ceiling, draped in the corners like folding curtains. The canvas forms an actual curtain over the doorway, so that to enter you must push back the fabric - if everything is surface, it’s all about looking beneath it. The performers shroud themselves with the canvas, lift it up, flip it over, expose its raw, unpainted side. Peake is inviting us behind the veil, making us look beneath the surface of painting. One performer pulls a sheet over my head as I’m watching, and we sit there for a while together.
What does Peake show us behind the scenes? Something of the painter’s physical creative process. The performers are focussed, concentrated, even concerned; they’re planning, working something out like a painter before their canvas. Layered into the soundscape are sighs and gasps, of creative pleasure, or exhaustion. For a time, the canvases are piled into heaps, like balls of scrunched up paper discarded by an artist while making. This is long, laborious work. Factual Actual presents the labour of creativity; the labour in making meaning. When moving the canvases, the performers wear gloves with gripping palms and smock-like costumes that evoke the uniform of an industrial labourer; later they change into similarly suggestive boiler suits. The winches signify mechanised labour, on a big scale. Notably, all the participants appear to be non-male identifying: the creative process, as presented here, isn’t a solo male genius being struck by a moment of inspiration, but a collective, arduous, inclusive exercise.
In making evident the labour involved in creativity, Peake also, perhaps unwittingly, exposes the labour involved in performing: another veil lifted. The work undertaken by the performers in performing the piece is long and materially unproductive. The art historian Claire Bishop has observed how performance art itself has become ‘industrialised’ and reliant upon ‘neoliberal labour practices such as precarious short-term contracts, outsourcing, and affective labour.’ Indeed, this staging of the creative process is almost an illustration of Bishop’s analysis that ‘the basis of labour is no longer the production of a commodity as end-product… but is a communicational act, designed for an audience’: creative process as spectacle. It’s unclear if Peake intended to critique such spectacle through, at times, recreating one - at the very least, the work reads as a comment on how creating isn’t always simple work.
Across the surfaces, and undertaking the labour, are the performers’ bodies. Just as the painted performer’s body becomes the centre of the action, it is the relationship between bodies and paint that is central to Peake’s show. The canvases are painted with bodies, when hoisted up they hang like carcasses. The performers’ bodies pose as living paintings, their twisting forms appear to be instantly captured on the canvases’ surfaces. Through representing the labour in painting, Peake shows that it is fundamentally related to the body: every brushstroke is a mark left by a body. This, of course, isn’t the first exploration of the relationship between body and paint. The performer’s painted-blue naked torso at the end is immediately reminiscent of Yves Klein’s blue body prints; the performer throwing paint reminiscent of Pollock. The staging of the creative process isn’t new either – think of Robert Rauschenberg painting live in performances of Story (1963). In this sense, Peake’s consideration of the history her work is entering into feels slightly fleeting and superficial, like the stack of books on painting tossed in a pile, from which scripts are made.
Despite Factual Actual not always feeling original in its exploration of painting, Peake has produced a performance that is a thought-provoking meditation on creative processes. The choreography of bodies, both those of the dancers and those painted across canvas, is beautiful and a pleasure to observe.
Florence Peake - Factual Actual: Ensemble is showing at Southwark Park Galleries until 2nd July.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
They unroll their boiler suit to their waist, revealing their bare torso, and begin to dance slowly across the canvas. Three other performers buzz around them: one holds up pages of ‘script’ for them to read aloud (a fourth performer hurriedly produces these scripts by copying out lines from a pile of books), the second holds the mic and the third begins to paint their naked torso with rubbing, dripping, splatting, flicking. It’s effortful for them all to coordinate and keep this exercise going, particularly for the painted dancer whose voice is breathy with exertion and sometimes winces as the paint hits their skin.
This performance is half of Florence Peake’s Factual Actual: Ensemble, which unravels across both Southwark Park Galleries. ‘Factual Actual’ is scheduled to repeat on several dates throughout the exhibition run, with an hour and a half duration: a performative exploration of painting as a physical process. The piece starts with the performers manipulating a collection of painted canvas sheets through the gallery: dragging, layering, lifting them, cloaking their own bodies with them. The canvases are sometimes attached to winches hanging from the rafters and hoisted upwards. There is another figure creeping through the space, their body disguised with abstractedly painted cut-outs. Performers create a soundscape with a looping mic and the noise of their actions. The canvases are then laid out, painted side down, and the participants pose across their surfaces, becoming the paintings themselves. Another performer adorns their body with bare canvas frames, transforming their figure with these wooden skeletons into something monstrous. Then, finally, the body-painting collective act that serves as the climax to the work.
Everything is about surfaces: visitors are asked to mask their shoes with plastic covers to protect the white-vinyl floor; the canvas sheets are malleable planes that are collaged together to create new images; the performer’s skin in the final act becomes a surface. In the second half of the exhibition at the Lake gallery, canvas scrawled with figures and limbs and splodges, is hung floor to ceiling, draped in the corners like folding curtains. The canvas forms an actual curtain over the doorway, so that to enter you must push back the fabric - if everything is surface, it’s all about looking beneath it. The performers shroud themselves with the canvas, lift it up, flip it over, expose its raw, unpainted side. Peake is inviting us behind the veil, making us look beneath the surface of painting. One performer pulls a sheet over my head as I’m watching, and we sit there for a while together.
What does Peake show us behind the scenes? Something of the painter’s physical creative process. The performers are focussed, concentrated, even concerned; they’re planning, working something out like a painter before their canvas. Layered into the soundscape are sighs and gasps, of creative pleasure, or exhaustion. For a time, the canvases are piled into heaps, like balls of scrunched up paper discarded by an artist while making. This is long, laborious work. Factual Actual presents the labour of creativity; the labour in making meaning. When moving the canvases, the performers wear gloves with gripping palms and smock-like costumes that evoke the uniform of an industrial labourer; later they change into similarly suggestive boiler suits. The winches signify mechanised labour, on a big scale. Notably, all the participants appear to be non-male identifying: the creative process, as presented here, isn’t a solo male genius being struck by a moment of inspiration, but a collective, arduous, inclusive exercise.
In making evident the labour involved in creativity, Peake also, perhaps unwittingly, exposes the labour involved in performing: another veil lifted. The work undertaken by the performers in performing the piece is long and materially unproductive. The art historian Claire Bishop has observed how performance art itself has become ‘industrialised’ and reliant upon ‘neoliberal labour practices such as precarious short-term contracts, outsourcing, and affective labour.’ Indeed, this staging of the creative process is almost an illustration of Bishop’s analysis that ‘the basis of labour is no longer the production of a commodity as end-product… but is a communicational act, designed for an audience’: creative process as spectacle. It’s unclear if Peake intended to critique such spectacle through, at times, recreating one - at the very least, the work reads as a comment on how creating isn’t always simple work.
Across the surfaces, and undertaking the labour, are the performers’ bodies. Just as the painted performer’s body becomes the centre of the action, it is the relationship between bodies and paint that is central to Peake’s show. The canvases are painted with bodies, when hoisted up they hang like carcasses. The performers’ bodies pose as living paintings, their twisting forms appear to be instantly captured on the canvases’ surfaces. Through representing the labour in painting, Peake shows that it is fundamentally related to the body: every brushstroke is a mark left by a body. This, of course, isn’t the first exploration of the relationship between body and paint. The performer’s painted-blue naked torso at the end is immediately reminiscent of Yves Klein’s blue body prints; the performer throwing paint reminiscent of Pollock. The staging of the creative process isn’t new either – think of Robert Rauschenberg painting live in performances of Story (1963). In this sense, Peake’s consideration of the history her work is entering into feels slightly fleeting and superficial, like the stack of books on painting tossed in a pile, from which scripts are made.
Despite Factual Actual not always feeling original in its exploration of painting, Peake has produced a performance that is a thought-provoking meditation on creative processes. The choreography of bodies, both those of the dancers and those painted across canvas, is beautiful and a pleasure to observe.
Florence Peake - Factual Actual: Ensemble is showing at Southwark Park Galleries until 2nd July.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
