SCULPTURE IN THREE ACTS:
PEAKE, LINDER, MONSEIGNAT
NEW COMMISSIONS at the Artist’s Garden!
Public Opening: Saturday 16 May 2026 from 4–8pm, RSVP here
Performances by Florence Peake at 4.15pm and 7.15pm, book tickets here
Speeches at 6.45pm; Mezcal Reina Cocktails
FREE | All Welcome | Exhibition: 17 May 2026–May 2027
The Artist’s Garden, on the roof terrace above Temple Tube Station WC2R 2PH
theCOLAB presents Sculpture in Three Acts: Peake, Linder, Monseignatat The Artist’s Garden, featuring two new commissions: Florence Peake’s first outdoor public sculptures Your Meaning not Your Materiality (YMNYM) created during live performances giving sculptural and bodily form to the ghosts of objects, Linder’s most expansive outdoor photomontage to date SHE IS HERE, a vinyl wrap recasting the Artist’s Hut as a theatrical pageant, and the installation of Adeline de Monseignat’s three sculptures Gusano, Up-Up and Croissant in a staged garden within the Artist’s Garden.
Independently conceived but experienced together, Peake, Linder and Monseignat’s works approach the sculptural theatrically, as acts of making and calls to action. The works each play with theatrical ideas of action on and off stage, the dramatic principle of ‘Chekhov’s Gun’1, the manipulation of time and connection to audience unfolding across the expansive 1,400sqm ‘stage’ that is the Artist’s Garden raised 10 metres above street level.
From Saturday 16 May 2026 until mid-May 2027 Sculpture in Three Acts joins previously commissioned works which remain on show by sculptors Jodie Carey, Holly Stevenson, Frances Richardson, Candida Powell-Williams and Alice Wilson. theCOLAB/the Artist’s Garden transformed the half-acre roof terrace above Temple tube station, neglected and dormant for over 150 years, into the world’s first and only sculpture garden dedicated to the work of women artists. Free and open to the public every day, the project is realised in close collaboration with Westminster City Council, since 2021.
from left to right details of: Florence Peake, Your Meaning Not Your Materiality YMNYM (2026), Linder SHE IS HERE, (2026)
Florence Peake’s work Your Meaning not Your Materiality (YMNYM) is performative and seeks to give human-scale sculptural and bodily form to objects and spaces that are connected to bereavement and loss, to the ghosts of objects. Peake’s two sculptures for the Artist’s Garden come into being outdoors in public during two live plaster pours. Choregraphed and replete with the tension implicit in the improvised nature of working in the open air, plaster is poured into the spaces between lying figures and a gay couple engaged in a prolonged kiss on a bench. Peake brings the closely guarded processes of the artist’s studio into full public view. She brings the backstage onstage.
Linder’s SHE IS HERE reclads the simple, diminutive but defiant structure of the Artist’s Hut in a bold provocative photomontage, repurposing it as a ‘pageant’, both the name for moveable theatrical scenery, and a celebratory procession of costumed participants. The protagonist of Linder’s work is Aletheia Talbot, Countess of Arundel (1585-1654), sitting for her portrait in front of a colonnade which leads the viewer to the sculpture gardens of Arundel House which once lay beneath the Artist’s Garden. Linder imagines Aletheia’s performance in the opulently costumed Masque of Queens (1609) by Ben Jonson with scenery by Inigo Jones inspired by Arundel House. The masque was preceded by an antimasque enacting the persecution and demonisation of women during the witch trials of the time. Linder’s choice of images exemplifies the principle of ‘Chekhov’s Gun’, with the herbs and foliage used by women herbalists as ‘evidence’ of malevolent magical powers in their widespread and fatal condemnation, for which they remain unpardoned in England.
Monseignat’s Gusano, Croissant, and Up-Up are re-staged and re-contextualised in the vastness of outdoor space, on a green lawn, in a garden of their own. The artist invites visitors onto the stage to play the part of a child, reclining, sitting and contemplating the enormity of the world through their eyes. Continuing the exploration of matrescence in the artist’s latest publication, Motherhood in Four Acts(2025), these sculptures are the next ‘Act’ of Motherhood: the rejoicing in the separation of mother from child and the wonder of observing a child as it gains an understanding of the world. They give abstract form to the experience of growing: learning about space and balance on the seesaw in Croissant; squirming around in restless curiosity in Gusano; and reaching up with arms open to reconnect with the mother in Up-Up. Monseignat views her sculptures as characters, their personalities and meanings developed by their surroundings and in turn developing the landscape of the self of each person who encounters them.
For Peake, Linder and Monseignat, time is a malleable sculptural material. Just as in theatre, it is structurally omnipresent: suspended, manipulated, it is a tool to explore the human condition.
Peake counterbalances the eternal presence of death, loss and grief with the immediacy of performance. Urgent and in real time, the performances embody the futile grasping to hold onto memories, the sculptures that remain embody the materiality of slip, erosion, change and configuration. YMNYM is constantly unfolding, from a performance lecture commissioned by theCOLAB in 2025 which spoke to the ‘emptying out of life’ to iterations across the UK, it delves into the timeless realms of invisible doubles and the ghosts of objects.
Linder’s time is not linear, and, in common with Peake, alludes to presences beyond the visible. SHE IS HERE is emblazoned across the back of the Artist’s Hut, broadcasting beyond the site to the passersby on Temple Place and workers in the building site opposite. SHE IS HERE is assertive in scale and succinct in meaning: notice the presence and power of women, present and past, a protest chant and a whispered truth. Linder juxtaposes images of women across time: ‘SHE’ is the spirit of Aletheia presiding over the world’s first sculpture garden for women artists from inside her portrait; ‘SHE’ is set in stone in the form of form of the Sphinx, the half-lion half-women guardian of the entrance to the hut and ‘SHE’ is in the a Roman sculpture described as A woman with hairstyle, both Arundel Marbles displayed in Aletheia’s c.17 formal gardens, which once lay under the Artist’s Garden. Today’s ‘SHE’ fixes our gaze through heavily made-up eyes floating on a bed of witch’s herbs; ‘SHE’ speaks through the lipstick-laden lips of sexualised women selling their products and their bodies in the fashion and advertising industries. All these ‘SHE’s are here, now.
Monseignat’s sculptures focus on a specific period of human development and in so doing, require us to reach back into our memories of the past, the origins of our learning and our understanding. The works urge us to relive awe, rekindle curiosity and appreciate the world through our senses. They awaken memories of being free to explore through our bodies. They demand our consideration over time, through the seasons, slowly.
Adeline de Monseignat, Up-Up (2025) (detail)
first commissioned for Bo Lee Gallery, Bruton for the exhibition Playscape
Audience, participant and viewer are essential activators of all three artists’ works. Peake actively involves the audience in the performance of sculpture in her red-floored theatre in the round. The pristine white plaster lying sculptures that remain on the blood red stage and upright on the bench when the performances are over tell the story of what has gone before. They bear the imprint of clothing, hand, cheek. Linder incorporates a mirror so that the viewer and her own reflected image become a dynamic part of this complex alchemical multi-dimensional montage. The viewer is complicit in both the present, future and past stories of women. Monseignat requires her audience to lie amongst, to shift bodily perspective, to see from below. Only then can they understand the meaning and remember the experience of being a child.
While Acts are defined structures within a theatre play, the act of making sculpturally is in a constant state of physical evolution. Peake deftly combines disciplines including dance, drawing, painting and sculpture and brings movement to public outdoor sculptures. The poured plaster once solid, embeds every detail of every surface it contacts, prompting the mind to reconfigure the form of the living being who has left the scene of the pour. Linder’s tool is the scalpel; her medium is photomontage. She uses cut out photographic images (rather than the mixed media of collage) to create often politically charged and jarring new realities. Cutting, layering, sticking and juxtaposing to create connections, narratives and social commentary, Linder’s SHE IS HERE is an expanded three-dimensional intervention into the diminutive structure of the Artist’s Hut which now stands defiantly and blissfully with a 14-storey development as backdrop. Monseignat works exclusively with natural materials, with a particularly profound understanding of stone. Based in Mexico-City, she draws from pre-Hispanic techniques of embedding whole stones into surfaces to create three-dimensional, large scale sculptural and architectural outdoor mosaics. Eschewing the intricacy and two-dimensionality of European wall and floor mosaics, she uses hand-applied, hand sized pebbles, rounded and semi-polished by the flow of England’s rivers. Taken together, their works embrace the complexity and variety of sculptural methods at play in the creation of three- dimensional works.
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.
Long live the Artist’s Garden!
Claire Mander, theCOLAB says, “Marking its fifth year, Sculpture in Three Acts: Peake, Linder, Monseignat cements the reputation of the Artist’s Garden as a place of firsts. As the world’s first and only sculpture garden dedicated to the pioneering work of women artists, Sculpture in Three Acts sees Florence Peake’s first public sculptures, Linder’s first outdoor three-dimensional photomontage and Adeline de Monseignat’s first exhibition in outdoor public space. Harnessing this public open space as a stage for our publics to engage with the voices of women artists audaciously addressing grief, asserting women’s presence across time and the independence of the mother, every day, for free is vital to the creative lifeblood of London. Long live the Artist’s Garden!’
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 in 2024. 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.
About Linder
Linder was born in Liverpool in 1954 and lives and works in London. In February 2025, she opened a major retrospective Danger Came Smiling at the Hayward Gallery, London which toured to Inverleith House, Edinburgh; Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea and will soon tour to Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool until September 2026. The touring show Linderism was mounted in 2020 at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, later travelling to the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne. The solo exhibition Femme/Objet, was organised in 2013 by the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, later travelling to the Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover. Linder has presented recent solo exhibitions at Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute (2025); Charleston, Firle (2022); Modern Art, London (2019); Glasgow Women’s Library (2018); Nottingham Contemporary (2018); Chatsworth House, Derbyshire (2018); The Hepworth Wakefield (2013); and Tate St Ives (2013). She has participated in recent two-person and group exhibitions at dépendance, Brussels (2022); Tate Liverpool (2021); the Royal Academy, London (2020); Camden Art Centre, London (2020); the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2019); and Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2019). In 2017, she was awarded the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award. Linder’s works are held in collections including the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Arts Council Collection, London; the DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Tate, London.
About Adeline de Monseignat
Adeline de Monseignat (b. Monaco, 1987) is a sculptor based in Mexico City whose work investigates the hidden life within matter, drawing on mythology, symbolism, psychology, and the uncanny. Monseignat’s sculptures are intimate yet relational and invite reflection on the energies and forces that animate both objects and human communities, past and present. She studied Language and Culture at University College London (BA, 2009), completed a Foundation Diploma at the Slade School of Fine Art (2010), and received an MA in Fine Art from City & Guilds of London Art School (2011). Her work has been shown internationally at Museo Cabañas, Museo MARCO, Saatchi Gallery, Victoria Miro, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, MASA Galeria, Cadogan Gallery), Contemporary Sculpture Fulmer and most recently, Playscape at Bo Lee and Workman, Somerset (2025).
About theCOLAB
theCOLAB is an independent, women-led collaborative laboratory and registered charity that unites people, land and art. We commission epic, life-affirming and career-defining sculptural works in undervalued and underused outdoor public spaces across the country from a coastal commissioning programme in Morecambe Bay to our exploratory drawing residency BODY and PLACE in the West of England. theCOLAB’s headline project, The Artist’s Garden, based on the roof terrace above Temple tube station in London is the world’s first and only sculpture garden dedicated to the pioneering work of women artists.
About The Artist’s Garden
The Artist's Garden has transformed a 1,400sqm hidden and neglected roof terrace above Temple tube station into a place for the public to experience an ambitious annual programme of new commissions, exhibitions and residencies of all scales. Situated next to Somerset House and accessible by steps from Temple Place, it is open to the public all day every day, for free, from 8am until dusk. It is the world’s first and only sculpture garden dedicated to the pioneering work of women artists.
theCOLAB’s work is in pursuit of revealing the rarely seen – only 13% of public sculptures in London are by women artists and they have a mere 23% representation in galleries and public collections. It is a beacon for best practice of regenerating public space through culture and a platform for achieving gender parity in outdoor public sculpture and beyond. This bold creative output is underpinned by inspiring and innovative educational outreach programmes including theCOLAB/ Royal College of Art/Yorkshire Sculpture Park Graduate Award residency and workshops for Westminster-based young people and those underrepresented in the arts, to broaden their accessibility to, and representation within, the creative industries, in partnership with Westminster Council’s City Lions.
Our 2026-7 Programme includes: the continued exhibition of existing commissions: Jodie Carey, Earthen, (2025), Holly Stevenson, Another Mother (2022), Frances Richardson Performed object: fig. 09130123, indolentia, (2023), Candida Powell-Williams Auguries Through the Mist (2024) and Alice Wilson, Savoy (2024). theCOLAB/Royal College of Art/Yorkshire Sculpture Park Graduate Award recipient for 2025, Hannah Hoebeke, is in residence in the Artist’s Hut. Interested in the dialogue between artist and sitter, she sculpts portraits in public of communities far from the rich, famous or aristocratic figures of art history. Hoebeke’s project, ‘The Women of the Cabman’s Shelter’ is a series of portraits of women cabbies incorporating their stories of London and its people and an assertion of their invisible contribution to fabric of London.
LONG LIVE THE ARTIST’S GARDEN!
The Artist’s Garden is in partnership with and supported by:
With philanthropic support from Nina and Samuel Wisnia, donors whom wish to remain private and with the kind permission of TfL/LUL.
Florence Peake’s commission is supported by Arts Council England, WSP UK, Calliope Arts Foundation, Westminster City Council St James’s Councillors’ Ward Budget Programme, Westminster City Lions and Young Westminster Foundation. Linder’s commission is supported by WSP UK with thanks to OK to COLOUR. Adeline de Monseignat’s installation is supported by WSP UK and Bo Lee Gallery, Bruton with thanks to EasiGrass.
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