Profile

Ali Pickard embeds textile craft techniques within fine art sculptures. She is interested in creating dialogue and often uses language and historical references to reflect on society and women’s lives. Her work is imbued with a sense of loss, change, extinction and reinvention. Her artist’s name is The Yaffingale which is an old word for Woodpecker.

Ali Pickard was for many years part of a Women’s Welding Collective in Edinburgh, making hand-crafted furniture and sculptures.  After a long period of not making, she started experimenting with fabric in 2021 and is now a self-taught textile sculptor.

In her analogue world of slow handcrafted pieces, each one can take 100s of hours to complete, embedding layers of technique and stories within. The process and quality of making are as important as the ideaswithin her work which include many hours spent on research and creating characters for a world which both is and isn’t ours. She sometimes introduces automata movement into the pieces.

History and modernity weave through the pieces, asking which stories get to be told, and who is telling the tale. She aims to draw people in through beautiful craft then make them think. The work is not loud activism, but it includes quiet subversion. She is interested in creating dialogue, and wrapped in a cloak of hand-crafted tactility and intrigue there are hidden stories of extinction and women.

As a lover and scavenger of language, word meanings and textures permeate through her pieces, whilst unsettling fairytale characters are often imbued with a sense of loss, change and reinvention.