Florence Peake’s Vitalities explores grief, movement and materiality in new exhibition at HOME

Open now and free to visit at HOME, Florence Peake’s striking, stirring new exhibition Vitalities offers a visceral exploration of grief, absence and the traces left behind when bodies and materials change form.

Conceived as a blend of sculpture, drawing and live performance, the seasonal installation examines the shifting relationship between physical presence and disappearance, with the internationally acclaimed artist using movement and material experimentation to consider the rhythms of loss, renewal and transformation.

Developed in collaboration with studio assistants, professional dancers and queer-identifying participants in Manchester, Vitalities takes form through works in plaster, concrete, pewter and paper, extending Peake’s long-standing interest in the body as both an artistic instrument and a site of expression. The resulting collection oscillates between the tangible and the elusive, using familiar materials to unpack the more plasmic experiences of grief, memory and change.

Eight large plaster sculptures form the exhibition’s core element, their porous surfaces bearing impressions of skin, folds and fragments of clothing. Created through movement-informed workshops with people who have experienced loss, the works take shape through a process of casting between participants, producing a corporeal rendering of the space between bodies, at once tactile and spectral, retaining traces of human presence while suggesting what has been lost.

The exhibition’s central space is immersed in sanguine red, where suspended plaster forms wrapped in membrane-like hessian evoke husks, shells and strange, metamorphic figures. Beneath them, cast-concrete dumbbells lie on the floor as a representation of the more familiar, mundane ideas of physical endurance, ageing and resistance, while signifying a reconciliation of absence and deeply human defiance through the aesthetics of resistance training.

Elsewhere, Peake’s chalk drawings on paper explore the spaces between held hands alongside studies of gravitational and eruptive movement, while a monumental work of vigorous markings, engraved into thick black paper, recalls instinctive gestures, ancient rituals and the ways memory might be inscribed into a landscape.

Across these works, the artist considers time as something cyclical rather than fixed, with absence and renewal existing in a continual state of exchange; every fortnight, dancers will appear in the space, activating the exhibition with paint through gesture and movement, each time unique and nuanced.

Curated by Clarissa Corfe, Florence Peake: Vitalities is open until Sun 31 Jan 2027. Tickets to the exhibition and activation performances are free, although advance booking is required.

Dates for the performances:

Sat 24 Oct 1pm and 3pm

Sat 7 Nov 1pm and 3pm

Sat 21 Nov 1pm and 3pm

Sat 5 Dec 1pm and 3pm

Sat 16 Jan 1pm and 3pm