Florence Peake: Your Meaning Not Your Materiality

In April as the award winning Hospitalfield Gardens come alive for Spring, several new sculptural works by celebrated artist and choreographer Florence Peake will be presented in the distinctive walled garden and historic house.

On August 16 2026, a public performance will punctuate the work, created with Scottish Dance Theatre.

Your Meaning Not Your Materiality examines themes of loss and the human desire to grasp the intangible in the face of grief through sculptural forms, painting, community collaboration and performance.Following Peake’s residency at Hospitalfield in 2024, when the artist spent over a month in the studios experimenting and creating new work across casting, drawing and performing, Hospitalfield is delighted to continue this relationship through the presentation of works that emerge from this developmental period.

Peake’s works will be presented in the gardens and into the historic house, with some site-specific works created for the garden in situ.Hospitalfield will host a week-long choreographic process with Scottish Dance Theatre in August that will result in a public, outdoor performance on 16 August 2026, this continues a working relationship between Peake and Scottish Dance Theatre that sparked during her initial residency.YMNYM questions what is left when a physical and material form has died, dissolved or been removed.

Building on Peake’s practice that often combines ‘Art’ with technical processes as both subject, metaphor and source for making, this new work seeks to engage in the history of western sculptural casting methods, using this material inquiry to explore themes of loss.By using casting processes to make permanent the physical form of something intangible, namely the spaces between bodies, Peake attempts to make physical something that is absent, addressing the futility of the human desire or instinct to grasp or hold materiality (or memory) when confronted with the inevitable erosion or re configuration.

The work draws from notions of loss extending from personal grief to worldwide extremes of conflict and climate change that perpetuate relentless or collective loss.Hospitalfield’s Walled Garden is one of the sites for the exhibition, architecturally significant due to its attachment to the grand house.

This rare feature is assumed to be the result of the house being laid out based on a medieval hospital plan where monks wished to be close to medicinal gardens.

The warming effect of the walls embraces visitors into a microclimate; transporting them to more pleasant climes.Your Meaning Not Your Materiality is jointly commissioned by theCOLAB The Artist’s Garden, HOME and Hospitalfield.

Funded by Arts Council England and The Henry Moore Foundation.Following its iteration at Hospitalfield, Your Meaning Not Your Materiality will continue through performances and exhibitions will tour to HOME, Manchester, theCOLAB, London, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris and Rønnebæksholm, Denmark (2027).