theCOLAB commissioned Florence Peake’s performance lecture ‘Your meaning not your materiality (YMNYM)’ on the occasion of ‘Taking Place: Women Artists in Public Spaces’ the conference co-convened by theCOLAB/The Artist’s Garden and Dr Kate McMillan/King’s College London on 24 June 2025.  

Florence Peake’s performance lecture disrupts the formal structure of the conference. It unfolds in the King’s College London’s Anatomy Lecture Theatre, built in 1927 above the Gilbert Scott Chapel of 1856, and below the old astronomy observatory where research on the radar began. The last anatomical dissection took place in this room in 1997, the first artistic dissections as part of Taking Place: Women Artists in Public Spaces. 

Peake’s performance lecture dissects and examine concepts underlying her expansive project ‘Your meaning not your materiality (YMNYM)’.  

The YMNYM body of work brings together performances, outdoor sculpture and a solo exhibition to attempt to solidify the invisible space between bodies and the resonance of objects in the aftermath of loss: the remnants in grief. Her work for Taking Place takes the form of a performance lecture incorporating the sculptural object and the audience to set up poetic responses to explore how objects have ghosts, invisible doubles and the double act between materiality and presence. The work questions what is left when the body has died/dissolved/ been removed; what is left when someone dies.  She presents absence as a stark and strong encounter. She explores the choreographic potential of the traditional sculptural method of casting in plaster and uses it to find the solid, static, concrete materiality of something that has disappeared. An attempt to grasp and hold the material from its slip and inevitable erosion, change and re-configuration. The performance taken as a whole reads as a metaphor for the many extremes we face today with climate change, war, and relentless loss in the world.

About Florence Peake

Florence Peake is known for her solo and group performance works and extensive visual art practice, since 1995.  Her approach is at once sensual and witty, expressive and rigorous.  By encouraging chaotic relationships between the body and material, Peake creates radical and outlandish performances.  YMNYM premiered at Leeds Art Gallery 2024 and other exhibitions include Factual Actual Exhibition and Performance from The National Gallery, SPG, Fruitmarket Edinburgh, Towner Gallery EastBourne;  Hayward Gallery’s touring British Art Show 9, Venice Biennale 2019; CRAC Occitanie, Sète, France, London Contemporary Music Festival, UK (2018),De La Warr Pavilion, Palais De Tokyo, Paris, Hayward Gallery, Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge.  She lives and works in London. 

Conference | Taking Place: Women Artists in Public Spaces

Taking Place: Women Artists in Public Spaces conference on 24 June 2025, presented at King's College London and convened by Dr Kate McMillan and Claire Mander, theCOLAB The Artist’s Garden. Join us for a collective and proactive rethinking of commissioning and the re-use of neglected public spaces to be more inclusive of women artists.  Bringing together art historians (Natalie Rudd), writers (The White Pube), commissioners (Claire Doherty/Situations and Bridget Sawyers/Tideway), local authorities (Westminster City Council), artists (including Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press RA) and institutions (Yorkshire Sculpture Park/National Museum for Women in the Arts, Washington DC). 

theCOLAB commissioned three new site-responsive interventions on the occasion of the conference: Florence Peake’s performance lecture ‘Your meaning not your materiality (YMNYM)’ and Daisy Collingridge’s sculptural walking performance ‘Walking with Gray’ respond to the historic King’s College London’s Anatomy Lecture Theatre, where anatomical dissections took place until 1997.  Kate McMillan’s audio-visual and sculptural intervention ‘The River’s Stomach (Songs of Empire)’ marks the temporary expansion of The Artist’s Garden into the nearby Strand Lane Roman Baths. 

All three commissions demonstrate important ways in which women artists work in public spaces.  Resourceful in their use of materials and medium, they all use the body, they all incorporate a performative aspect, they use speech or song or silence, they are made by hand at the sewing machine or with the needle or clay or plaster.  The work’s scale is human, their duration is finite. Experienced in real physical time, they are sculptural encounters, ways of communicating narratives of place and non-place. The materials and form of the work will continue to exist, to be developed and re-used, to become part of a series.  The immaterial resonance of the work lives on in memory, experience and the stories the viewers tell of what they saw.  Their practices evade the ‘congealing of significance’ that occurs under the label of public art, their narratives of history and site are nuanced, profound and untold. 

About The Artist’s Garden

theCOLAB is an independent women-led collaborative laboratory working to bring together people, land and art by realising artists’ most far-flung and life-affirming work in response to places beyond the confines of the white cube for the public. The Artist’s Garden transformed the neglected half acre rooftop on Temple tube station into a vast free public sculpture garden to give women artists the opportunity to make their first, early or greatest outdoor sculptural intervention to promote greater appreciation of their work in public. The annual programme comprises major and smaller scale commissions and theCOLAB/Royal College of Art/Yorkshire Sculpture Park Graduate Award residency. theCOLAB is a registered charity. www.thecolab.art / @thecolab.art

Contact/Further information:  Alice Walters projects@thecolab.art | @thecolab.art