Ali Darke
Member Of The Royal Society of Sculptors
Ali Darke is a London based artist, curator and researcher. Through drawing and sculpture, she captures states of being, expressing the tension between a self, embodied in the world, with the ever-shifting mind that can drift and dissociate, beyond the body’s boundary. She creates hybrid entities and fractured parts that hover between growth and decay, beauty and abjection. Using discarded or organic material, enriches her work with their inherent histories and associations. Ideas of haunting, echoes of loss, longing, and psychic fragmentation, resurface in the materiality and form of her work. Evidence of her creative processes; cutting, stitching, re-shaping, covering and casting, implies themes of repair, metamorphosis and memorial. Drained of colour, they suggest remains, bleached by time, testing tipping points between recognisable objects and mere things. And finally, hanging, pinning, or collapsing the forms, transforms their dynamic presence in space.
The evocative language of psychoanalysis describes an alchemical exchange between the body, mind and environment with metaphoric allusions to human biology, elemental forces and earthly matter, inspiring her visceral response. Researching ancient and contemporary beliefs surrounding loss and memorial, connects to ideas of entanglement with material vivacity and deep time. Developing current work, she considers an ecological entwining that mirrors psychoanalytical theory of the mind; that however deep we go we find the other there, a porosity between external and internal phenomena, and a past, present and future in co-existence.
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