Around the time that Ceal Floyer, who has died aged 57 of a brain tumour, was arriving on the stage of the international art world in the 1990s, she was already developing the idea of a performance in a major concert hall that spoke to her nervousness and unease about her newfound status. However, when she approached the Sydney Opera House with her proposal as part of the city’s 1998 biennale, it was turned down, deemed somehow disrespectful.
Confused at first, the audience quickly caught on to what Floyer was doing, and was transfixed
Three years later, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, in collaboration with Ikon Gallery, granted her wish. On the night at Symphony Hall, prior to a programme featuring Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No 2, and billed simply as A Nail Biting Performance, Ceal stepped on to the conductor’s podium, leaned towards a microphone and began biting her nails. There is no question that she was nervous, but she stayed for a full five minutes, paying close, slow attention to each of her fingernails. The audience, confused at first, quickly caught on and became transfixed by this diminutive figure dwarfed by the cavernous space around her, standing among empty chairs soon to be occupied by orchestral musicians.
A Nail Biting Performance – a “live sound piece”, as she called it – was as excruciating and touching as it was smartly funny. It took place on the eve of Ceal’s solo show at Ikon Gallery, of which I was then the director, and was the only work in which the artist was physically present. “Initially I really didn’t want it to be myself on stage doing this thing,” Ceal said, “but somehow the idea of directing a performer to do it seemed not only extraneous … but ultimately, and ironically I suppose, a little bit pompous or egotistical.”
This sentiment was typical of Ceal, an artist who temperamentally could not have been less like an art star. “Often … what informs my practice is a certain dissatisfaction with being an artist, with operating in this art context, even if it is the very situation that accommodates, and tolerates, my sort of work,” she said. “By admitting this scepticism I make myself vulnerable, and then by manifesting this uncertainty as art, I compound the situation still further. It’s a bit like being in a really loud and crowded room – a party, say – and suddenly the music stops and you’re the last one left talking, and your words just sort of hang there in the air.”
Floyer’s 1994 installation Mousehole, at the Museo Madre, Napoli, 2009. Photograph: Peppe Avallone/Museo Madre, Courtesy the artist, Museo Madre and Esther Schipper Berlin/Paris/Seoul
Ceal’s artwork was marked by a particular sense of humour derived from shifting points of view, puns, double takes and an idiosyncratic reordering of everyday phenomena. It conveyed simultaneously the possibility of creativity in any situation, and a taste for the absurd. As a student at Goldsmiths College, London (1991-94), she replaced existing push/pull doorplates on the way to staff offices with new ones inscribed “pushed” and “pulled”.
Light Switch (1992-99), another early work, involved a slide projector beaming the actual-size image of a light switch directly on to a wall. Any illusion was undermined by the close proximity of the image to its source; the image was obviously projected. At the same time, Ceal was suggesting an inversion of the relationship between her subject matter and the medium of electric light.
A similar “switch” occurs in a much later work, Hammer and Nail (2018), a video piece that features stock footage of a nail being hit into a plank of wood. Through an adjustment in the cropping of the image, the plank appears to push itself up towards the head of the nail with every hammer blow, rather than the nail being violently driven downwards, reversing the action.
Ceal’s aesthetic was minimalist. Overgrowth (2004) is a photographic image of a bonsai tree magnified through slide projection to assume regular tree-sized proportions; Mousehole (1994), is a Tom and Jerry-style cartoon mouse hole drawn on a sheet of A4, propped up against a wall. Monochrome Till Receipt (White), from 1999, lists white items bought from a supermarket. The latter was acquired by Tate for considerably more than the £48.44 printed at the bottom of the receipt.
‘Before she graduated, Ceal was already being noticed by well-placed critics and curators’ Photograph: Photo © Hugo Glendinning
Born in Karachi, as Cecile, to David Floyer, chief executive of Burmah Oil Company, and an Austrian mother, Gerlinde (nee Mayer), she spent some time as a young child in Sydney and Rabat, Morocco, before settling in Devon in the UK with her family from 1975.
She studied at Goldsmiths in the wake of the Young British Artists (YBAs) who had emerged from that institution in the late 80s, and before she graduated was already being noticed by well-placed critics and curators. She was part of the group exhibition General Release, organised by the British Council for the 1995 Venice Biennale, and subsequently had many significant art outings including the Tate Triennial (2003), Shanghai Biennale (2006), Singapore Biennale (2010), and Guangzhou Triennial and Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany (both 2012).
In 1997, Ceal was awarded a scholarship to take up residence at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, and soon made that city her home. In 2002, a malignant tumour was found and, following surgery, she recovered to a remarkable extent, continuing to exhibit regularly with Lisson Gallery, Esther Schipper in Berlin and elsewhere, and winning a number of awards such as the Preis der Nationalgalerie für Junge Kunst, Berlin (2007) and the Nam June Paik Art Center prize (2009), before the cancer returned last year.
Ceal is survived by two brothers, Mark and James.
Ceal (Cecile) Floyer, artist, born 18 April 1968; died 11 December 2025
