Before we begin, a gentle note: in this episode we speak about death, grief, psychosis and depression. If you’re feeling tender, you might want to pause and come back when the time feels right.
Today I’m joined by the extraordinary artist Eddie Peake.
Eddie builds exhibitions the way some artists use paint. Space, for him, is a material. He constructs environments that place you inside the liminal fourth wall — that charged threshold between viewer and viewed, between participation and observation, between ecstasy and horror. In his shows, the audience doesn’t stand outside the work. It becomes part of it.
We talk about masculinity stretched to breaking point, about desire and shame, about the theatre of intimacy and the politics shaping our cultural moment. Eddie pushes back on what the art world calls authenticity, questioning whether expression itself has become a learned, conservative language dressed up as radical. In an age of populist politics and market-ready aesthetics, he asks what it really means to resist.
We move through psychosis and fluorescent colour, through joy that masks collapse, through professional jealousy, through the experience of stepping away from a career to care for someone and then returning with force — ten exhibitions in a single year across six cities. We talk about making hundreds of works quickly, and then spending four years on just three paintings. We talk about Brecht, alienation, and the refusal to let the viewer settle into passive consumption.
What stands out in Eddie’s practice is the pairing of intellectual rigour with emotional candour. He does not smooth over contradiction. He lets it stay visible: tenderness and obsession, clarity and doubt, control and collapse.
If you are an artist navigating identity, politics, envy, burnout, or the uneasy feeling that your work is either too much or not enough, this conversation will likely resonate.
Now let me introduce you to Eddie Peake.
What We Learned from Eddie Peake
There is something instructive in the rhythm of Eddie’s practice.
He does not move in straight lines. He moves in cycles — intensity, withdrawal, return. Production, pause, recalibration. At times, rapid output across multiple cities. At others, near silence, where a small number of works absorb years of attention. Neither mode is treated as failure. Neither is treated as ideal. They simply exist as different conditions of making.
There is also a refusal here — a refusal to smooth over what is uncomfortable. Jealousy is not edited out. Depression is not aestheticised. Psychosis is not sensationalised. Instead, these experiences sit alongside colour, structure, humour, and theory. Not as contrast, but as coexisting material.
And perhaps the more unsettling thread running through this conversation is the question of authenticity itself. What if authenticity is not a truth we uncover, but a language we inherit? What if some of what feels most “true” in contemporary art is actually the most culturally rehearsed?
Eddie doesn’t offer resolution. He offers pressure. A way of staying inside difficult questions long enough for them to change shape.
For artists and thinkers trying to locate themselves within a culture that often rewards speed, clarity and legibility, there is something quietly radical in that refusal.
The invitation, if there is one, is not to solve anything. It is to notice what happens when you don’t.
