Ali Darke MRSS
Ali Darke is a London based artist, curator and researcher. Through drawing and sculpture, she creates a scenography of the inner world in response to memory and myth, and the evocative language of psychoanalysis.
Ideas of ‘haunting’, echoes of trauma, loss and psychic fragmentation are viscerally expressed in materiality and form. Her work appears to hover between life and death, entrapment and escape.
Scavenging for discarded material, she transforms their dynamic potential through incongruent amalgamations and the making process. Cutting, stitching, stuffing, shaping, and then by hanging, pinning, or collapsing the forms, she plays with their gravity and presence in space. Hybrid beings emerge, testing unsettling tipping points of beauty, absurdity and abjection. 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, June 2021.