Ali Darke MRSS

Ali Darke trained as a theatre designer at Wimbledon College of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art.  Working as a designer in theatre and film she also taught design for performance at the University of the Arts, London. Awarded a Professional Doctorate in Fine Art in 2021 by the University of East London, she developed her research and fine art practice. 

Through sculpture, drawing and installation she has evolved a scenography of the inner world. Intrigued by memory and myth, and the evocative language of psychoanalysis she describes an alchemical exchange between the mind, body and environment. 

Evocations transmitted across generations are experienced as unlocatable, unspeakable, the ‘unthought-known’. Ideas of haunting, echoes of trauma, loss and longing, and psychic fragmentation resurface in visceral materiality and form. She creates hybrid entities and fractured parts that hover between growth and decay, beauty and abjection. Making use of discarded domestic and organic material, brings new associations and inherent histories, marked in stains, tatters and patinas. The objects suggest ancient specimens, bleached and calcified by time. 

Evidence of her creative process; cutting, stitching, stuffing, re-shaping and casting, imply themes of repetition, repair and reuse. Then 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.