BRITISH ART SHOW 9

Opening at Aberdeen Art Gallery, July 2021 and touring the UK until December 2022

CRUDE CARE_Florence Peake_Phot o credit © Anne Tetzlaff_24.png

CRUDE CARE_Florence Peake_Phot o credit © Anne Tetzlaff_26.png

For British Art Show 9, Florence Peake is developing CRUDE CARE (2020-21), commissioned by Hayward Gallery Touring and Aberdeen Art Gallery, and supported by the Art Fund.

CRUDE CARE is a new body of work comprising a performance, ceramic sculpture and film informed by Aberdeen’s landscape, its natural resources granite and oil, and the treatment of workers in the UK care sector. Peake began holding discussions and workshops with a group of carers local to Aberdeen in early 2020 to uncover and understand the emotional and physical costs that they experience, working in the care industry.

The workshops culminated in a burial ritual, developed by Peake with Earl Solomon, a caregiver based in Aberdeen, and Kirstie Richardson, a dancer who works in care settings. Deliberately inverting the extractive process of mining, the trio took turns to cover one another in thick layers of clay, before carefully extracting each body. The resulting sculpture – now fired and glazed – becomes something between a rocky bed, an altar and a stage.

CRUDE CARE will be exhibited at Aberdeen Art Gallery from 10 July - 10 October, and touring to Wolverhampton, Manchester and Plymouth until December 2022.

CRUDE CARE, 2021
Glazed ceramic sculpture, performance and film
Aberdeen City Council (Archives, Gallery & Museums collection)
Commissioned by Hayward Gallery Touring and Aberdeen Art Gallery for British Art Show 9 and made possible with Art Fund support

Made with Charlee Riley, Technical Services Coordinator, Helen Partridge Love and Kevin Andrew Morris, Technical Service Officers Ceramics & Glass, Gray’s School of Art / Robert Gordon University; Jason Williamson, Exhibitions Officer and Rachel Thibbotumunuwe, Learning Manager, Aberdeen Art Gallery; Kirstie Richardson, assistant and workshop facilitator; Earl Soloman, performer and carer; the carers who partook in workshops Earl Solomon, Kirsty Russell, Sarah Baganz, and Jan Dijkhuizen.