Ali Darke
Member Of The Royal Society of Sculptors
Ali Darke is a London based artist, curator and researcher. Through drawing and sculpture, she creates hybrid entities and fractured parts that hover between growth and decay, beauty and abjection. She uses discarded and organic material, enriching her work with their inherent histories and associations. Ideas of haunting, echoes of loss, longing, and psychic fragmentation, resurface through materiality and form. Evidence of Ali’s creative process; cutting, stitching, covering or casting, hint at themes of metamorphosis, repair and memorial. By hanging, pinning, or collapsing the forms, she 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.
Suggesting a hinterland between the mind and the body where the unconscious leaves a trace, Ali encounters 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