Ali Darke
Member Of The Royal Society of Sculptors
Ali Darke is a London based artist, curator and researcher. Through drawing and sculpture her work has evolved into a scenography of the inner world. Ideas of haunting, echoes of loss, longing, and psychic fragmentation, resurface in the materiality and form of her work. She creates hybrid entities, fractured parts and un-monumental objects that test unsettling tipping points, hovering between growth and decay, beauty and abjection.
Scavenging for discarded domestic and organic materials, enriches her work with their inherent histories and associations. She transforms their evocative potential through incongruent amalgamations and the making process. Evidence of her creative practice; cutting, stitching, stuffing, and re-shaping imply themes of repetition, repair and reuse. By hanging, pinning, or collapsing the forms, she transforms their dynamic presence in space.
Suggesting a hinterland between the mind and the body where the unconscious leaves a trace, she discovers the unexpected and uncannily familiar.
Ali’s work “comments with lacerating precision on female domestication through some of the means that subdued us. It’s keen and needling in all the right ways...and the truth of materials and their handling shines through.”
Cherry Smyth