The Yaffingale Flintshire, United Kingdom

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Ali Pickard The Yaffingale is interested in history and modernity, which stories get to be told, and who is telling the tale, both within fiction and society. She works with craft techniques within fine art sculptures, principally in textile and hand-embroidery now, mixed with wood, metal and automata.

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.

After a long period of not making for many reasons, she is now based in North Wales where she is creating a new collection working with mainly textile craft techniques within fine- art sculptures. The process and quality of making are as important as the ideas within her pieces, and she spends many hours on research, hand-embroidery and creating characters for a world which both is and isn't ours. Her artist’s name is The Yaffingale (which is an old word for Green Woodpecker)

She likes to create characters, and sometimes introduces automata movement into the pieces. She’s interested in history and modernity. Which stories get to be told, and who is telling the tale, both within fiction and society, and where the hidden stories are. Her work is often described as thought-provoking and unsettling . She is interested in creating dialogue and her work is often imbued with a sense of loss or change, extinction and reinvention. What do we lose in order to create space for change.