Charley Peters is an artist, researcher and educator working across painting and public art. Her practice explores perception, materiality and the relationship between physical and digital images, with a particular interest in how contemporary technologies shape visual experience.
Peters’ paintings draw on the visual cultures of digital technology alongside imagery associated with haunting, spectral presence and the uncanny. Her recent work brings together references to vanitas painting, organic structures, technological artefacts and imagined hybrid organisms, creating ambiguous forms that move between the natural and artificial, the familiar and the strange. Working primarily in oil paint, she explores the tension between illusion and material presence, using the particular qualities of painting to question how images are constructed, perceived and understood.
Her research extends these concerns into the histories and contemporary cultures of illusion, simulation and the supernatural. Through writing and practice-led investigation, she examines how technologies have been used to produce experiences of presence and absence, from historical optical illusions and spiritualist phenomena to contemporary digital simulations and synthetic imagery. Her research explores how these technologies shape our experiences of images, bodies and the boundaries between what is real, artificial or apparently present.
Alongside her studio practice, Peters develops large-scale public art commissions and site-specific projects for architectural, cultural and public environments. Her work combines visual research, digital processes and material experimentation, often involving collaboration with architects, communities and specialist fabricators. Selected projects include work for Facebook, Hospital Rooms, London Art Fair and Wembley Park.
Peters has exhibited internationally, including at the National Museum in Gdańsk, Poland; Yantai Art Museum, China; POP Gallery at Griffith University, Queensland, Australia; Kelly-McKenna Gallery, New Jersey, USA; Z20 Sara Zanin Gallery, Rome; and Alon Zakaim Gallery, London. She has also participated in fundraising exhibitions organised by Hospital Rooms at Hauser & Wirth, London. Her writing on painting and contemporary visual culture has appeared in publications including Turps Banana, a-n, Abstract Critical and Instantloveland.
Peters holds a PhD in Fine Art Theory and Practice and is Head of Graduate School at City & Guilds of London Art School, where she provides academic leadership across postgraduate programmes in Fine Art, Carving, Conservation and Collection Care & Management.
