theCOLAB is delighted to announce Florence Peake’s first public outdoor sculpture commission at the Artist’s Garden the world’s first and only sculpture garden dedicated to asserting the pioneering work of women artists.  Entitled Your Meaning Not Your Materiality (YMNYM), the work features two live public performances involving plaster poured between choregraphed bodies. 

In one performance, four figures lie on the ground, head to toe. Buckets of liquid plaster are poured and fill the absences between them. In the other performance a married gay couple sit on one of the benches and engage in a lingering kiss. The liquid white plaster is again poured, giving form to this moment of intimacy and tenderness by taking up the space between their bodies, where their energies and meanings coalesce.

The dates for the performances are 16 May 2026 at 4.15pm and 7.15pm and are free, with all welcome. Please book your free tickets to the performances here. The two outdoor sculptures in plaster remain and will be exhibited from 17 May 2026 to mid-May 2027 on the roof terrace above Temple Tube in London.

This is a unique opportunity to attend a live outdoor sculptural event at The Artist’s Garden, a project realised in close collaboration with Westminster City Council, since 2021.

The two live events give form to the ‘vitalities’, the energies and spaces left when someone dies or something disappears, when absence becomes a starkly strong encounter.

Peake’s YMNYM takes place across many locations, years and iterations.  A starting point was Peake’s performance lecture commissioned by theCOLAB as part of Taking Place: Women Artists in Public Spaces in June 2025.  Through poetry, word and gesture, she described witnessing life leaving her mother’s body before the audience in the historic Anatomy Theatre at King’s College London.  While Peake ‘can’t stop …. The meaning, emptying’, she can explore our complicated relationship to objects and spaces that are connected to bereavement and loss. YMNYM considers how to give human-scale sculptural and bodily form to the ghosts of objects and the notion of an invisible double.  It addresses the futility of the strong human desire to grasp and hold materiality (or memory) in the face of slip and inevitable erosion, change and re-configuration.

Following a period of intense personal grief, encompassing the loss of several family members, divorce, middle age and loss of home, Peake is attempting to make tangible the invisible, by casting the space between bodies. Bringing the project into public outdoor space, beyond the gallery walls, the work’s intention is to reach beyond grief for one, to the shared, universal human experiences of loss, grief and bereavement. Extending the geographical reach of YMNYM is significant. From a choregraphed performance at Leeds City Art Gallery in 2024, to the performance lecture in London in 2025, the work will appear at HOME in Manchester and Hospitalfield in Aberdeenshire in 2026, followed by Ronnebaeksholm, Denmark in 2027. 

YMNYM is a dynamic, evolving, responsive body of work with community engagement at the core of the project.  At the Artist’s Garden, groups of Westminster City Lions 13 – 16 year olds gather throughout the project while learning how to mix, make and share stories with plaster with the artist.

Peake’s work has long embraced dynamism and challenged the conventions of making. Her practice traverses choreography, in particular the Skinner Releasing Technique, drawing, painting, sculpture and performance.  The work is a constant negotiation between body and object by exploring the energy, states of being and consciousness and how they relate to our encounters in the world.  Peake harnesses the expressiveness of the body within carefully controlled, choreographed and deeply moving events that leave behind the tangible marks and sculptures of embodied and universal experience.  In ‘Your Meaning Not Your Materiality’ Peake wants to engage in the history of western sculpture making and casting methods/techniques, then use this enquiry to explore broader themes around loss.

Peake’s commission is part of the exhibition Sculpture in Three Acts:  Peake, Linder, Monseignat.  It joins previous commissions at the Artist’s Garden by sculptors Jodie Carey, Candida Powell-Williams, Frances Richardson, Holly Stevenson and Alice Wilson.   

Sculpture in Three Acts: Peake, Linder, Monseignat marks the fifth year of the Artist’s Garden, established in 2021.  Its ambitious programme of commissioning and exhibiting career-defining and life-affirming works by artists at all stages of their career acts as a beacon of what women can achieve, collectively, when they take centre stage.  The Artist’s Garden stands true to the principle of Chekhov’s Gun, “One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off. It's wrong to make promises you don't mean to keep." The Artist’s Garden is a promise to put the work of women centre stage and ensure the narratives of women across place and time are embedded in history as we process towards gender parity.

Claire Mander, Director of theCOLAB says,

“Commissioning Florence Peake’s first outdoor sculptural work, YMNYM, continues theCOLAB’s dedication to presenting pioneering contemporary work by women artists. Peake breaks conventions, confronts taboos about death, sexuality and gender for the publics of London and beyond.  YMNYM is a body of work set to expand and disseminate across the UK and beyond, with the Artist’s Garden and its 13 – 16 year old City Lions proudly at its inception.”.

Florence Peake, Artist says,

“For this important commission with theCOLAB in my home city, I want to honour the significance of the opportunity, the site, and its role as a platform for women’s public sculpture. The works will be ambitious and adventurous, incorporating live performance and an element of risk.

Rooted in the site’s history as a queer space and former cruising ground, and presented alongside the work of other extraordinary women artists, the sculptures will be created through a live performance process, casting the space between lovers as they kiss. Through these new works, I want to explore themes of loss, absence, and love, and to grasp, and make solid, the chemistry that exists in the unseen spaces between bodies.”

YMNYM CREDITS:

Lead Artist: Florence Peake
Executive Producer: Caroline Smith
Tour and Live Producer: Eve Veglio-Hüner
Production and Studio Manager: Jim Tuck
Production assistant: Mathilda Laird
Pastoral support: Scarlet Ma and Valerie Gage
Dramaturgical support: Eve Stainton
Performers: Joe Moran, Donovan Morris, Catherine Hoffman, Rodrigo Peñalosa, Rachel Lopez de la Nieta, Sophie Khan
Supported by young people from City Lions, Westminster
Image: Sam Tingman

Commissioning partners for YMNYM project:

theCOLAB The Artist’s Garden
Hospitalfield
HOME

Touring partners:

Kunsthal Rønnebæksholm & Billedskolen Storstrøm
Lafayette Anticipations

Florence Peake is represented by Richard Saltoun Gallery, London