Artist statement with Bio

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. She has a fascinating background in puppetry (Henson’s Creature Shop: she worked on Labyrinth, among other titles, and at Warner Bros: Li’l Shop of Horrors, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles). Then she got her MA in theatre design at the Slade, and went on to teach at Wimbledon College of Art (as well as Central St Martins and London College of Fashion at UAL/University of the Arts London) for a total of 14 years. Eventually, she realised that she was really a sculptor at the core, and she got her Professional Doctorate in Fine Art at University of East London (UEL). It’s Dr. Ali Darke, thank you very much!

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.

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In the process and progress of Life, anything can and will happen. So it is with As Above, So Below.

The show in Small House Two is on for two months (July – August 2023) and Ali will be reinstalling work at various points throughout that time. The photos you see above will remain, and more photos will have been added below, before the summer is out…

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The vision for Ali Darke’s Small House Gallery exhibition:

^{Ali Darke, MICROVESTIGES (ii), 2022 DESCRIPTION Created for One-to-Ten Gallery. (plaster, linen)}

AS ABOVE SO BELOW

Continuing an investigation into macro and micro speculation, I have been drawing a series of ORBs developing the ideas for sculptural work. These spherical forms might appear like models of ginormous distant planets or microscopic cells and both elude to things either in the process of becoming or degenerating. I enjoy this ambiguity. My title refers to the reading of the stars to foretell the future or the past of our life on earth – a different kind of specular gaze that hopes to navigate our way, placing us in time and space or it might be referring to an analysis of physiology at the microscopic level to make some diagnosis. With this commission, I like the possibility that the scale is ambiguous when objects are recorded in photography and witnessed online, but I also recognise that a live encounter with the miniature can draw the mind and body of the viewer into the model as if what they are seeing were the ‘whole world’.

My proposal [was] to develop these ORBS in three dimensions, placing them in the different spaces of SMALL HOUSE 2 (my preferred Small House but I think my idea would [have] work[ed] in any of the Small Houses) – some minescule, others totally filling the void, or even bulging out beyond the borders of the walls. I am excited by the prospect of the whole house becoming its own kind of solar system or organism – the house working as a metaphor for the boundaries or structures of the cosmos or the body of a living being. I am drawn to this particular miniature house with the architecture of an attic and basement spaces that bring their own poetic associations to the project of secret, hidden, and subterranean spaces. I [am] also consider[ing] the liminal spaces between floors and rooms – the stairs and corridors as the ‘arteries’ of the building creating a web of interconnecting material. I am also excited by the added dimension and potential of the lighting in these spaces with my forms within.

I [am] continu[ing] my experiments with texture and form using plaster, wax and fabric to create the sculptural work through processes of casting, carving, stitching and stuffing.

^{Ali Darke, ORB (iv) – (ink pen drawing, developing ideas for proposal)}

^{Ali Darke, MICRO VESTIGES (i), 2022 Created for One-to-Ten Gallery. (plaster, linen)}

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Why degrowth has outgrown its own name