Meet Ali Pickard / The Yaffingale
Ali Pickard - Artist
Ali Pickard trained in Metal Art as part of a women into non-traditional skills project in Edinburgh, where she then spent many years as part of a Women’s Welding Collective, creating intricate and time-consuming sculptures and bespoke furniture. She is curious about movement, shadow, and surface contrast. She likes to melt hot metal, and embroider delicate fabric, tell stories, create characters, and make things move. She’s interested in history and modernity, which stories get to be told, and who is telling the tale, both within fiction and society.
Now based in North Wales she used a residency in Ty Pawb in 2022 to reset her practise and is currently creating a new body of work. She spent many years in South America working with women’s recycled design projects, followed by running community art projects here in Wales. But by 2022 it was time to return to making a new body of work with different techniques, scale and emphasis. This is a continuing process involving a lot of experimenting, head scratching & solving technical and creative problems, and learning. But it’s a process she is enjoying and Ty Pawb residency and maker Space exhibition was the first step back in the this old new direction. She works with craft techniques within fine art sculptures and likes to mix wood and metal with fabric, spending many hours hand-embroidering or welding tiny pieces of metal to create texture, or tell a story.
Her artist name is The Yaffingale (which is an old word for green woodpecker).
IKT delegates will meet Leigh when visiting PERICLO artist studios in Wrexham during IKT Congress 2023.
Follow Ali on Instagram
About PERICLO
PERICLO IS A PLATFORM FOR RISK AND EXPERIMENTATION IN CONTEMPORARY VISUAL ARTS.
Periclo presents a programme of exhibitions, talks, screenings and performances. The space also provides research facilities through its reading room, with a particular focus on the relationship between artist and curator.
The exhibition programme and associated events provide artists an opportunity to test new ideas, to take risks and to experiment with content, themes and with display methods.
Visit PERICLO website.