Upon entering the other-world of Songs of the Earth (1975 - 2021), it is immediately clear Peters ... manipulates, moulds and uses light, revelling in its possibilities. What he does with light he also does with the dark ...a parade of highlights and recesses, and the eyeballs and brain lurch into self-pleasuring hyperactivity. Fish (2020) is the... newest in the show. Three pink neon penises hang in mid-air ... pointing randomly and obscenely at their artistic bedfellows. End on, however, the neon shape becomes a vagina and, all of a sudden, the puerile becomes universal, philosophical and fundamental. In 1976, responding to Peters' Songs of the Earth at the Auckland City Art Gallery the year before, Wystan Curnow noted that the works of Peters 'seem to comprise "things of the world" caught in the act of being themselves'...For all the headplay, wordplay, artplay and theatrics, the media that Peters uses are of the elements―fire, water, earth and air. For all his knowledge and exposition of philosophy, art and literature, Peters is grounded in the fundaments and foundations of life itself. He matches the human body to these elemental forces, and at times pitches the two against each other.

Don Abbott - Art New Zealand, No. 179, Spring 2021