Damaris Athene

About

Damaris Athene’s transdisciplinary practice explores the posthuman and how lived experience mediated through technology offers new ways of viewing the materiality and potential of the body. Posthuman theory offers an opportunity to reexamine hierarchies in a post-anthropocentric world, blurring the borders between humans and non-humans. Athene is drawn to where language fails us but embodied experience does not. Her work inhabits liminal space, slipping between the real and unreal, and swimming through permeable boundaries between bodies, the organic and synthetic, the digital and physical, and 2D/3D space. Work transmutes from painting to sculpture, photography, and digital collage, often accumulating in installations.

Athene’s practice mutates and evolves, feeding itself like the ouroboros and mirroring the unrelenting regurgitation of imagery on the internet. She explores the fluid interconnections of matter and life, the entanglement of humans, animals, the environment and technology. Uncanny illusions create a sublime and slippery reality, interfering with your perception. Doubling disguises duplicitously. Work folds in on itself and is kneaded into new forms. Depth is flattened and then reformed. Bodily leakage is contained, sanitised and controlled. Fluids attempt to flow but freeze and glitch. Digital flatness and perfection seduce but obstruct any sensual satisfaction.

Gradient_Shift continues Damaris Athene’s exploration of the posthuman and how digital technology alters our perception of bodily materiality using new techniques developed at the RCA. Kiln-formed glass resembles crystallised glistening flesh or rotting vegetive matter, frothing and multiplying while vibrating between beauty and disgust. Laser-cut stainless steel mirrors the shape of the glass and creates a fake shadow on the wall, sharply contrasting the organic nature of the glass and doubling the fake over the real, making the whole installation look like a digital artefact. The glass shifts on the metal, hinting at a potential for movement.

Impalpable|00 conceals and seduces, purporting to offer a private moment while translucency exposes you – a threshold you can see through and traverse, a boundary that is simultaneously created and trespassed. The chiffon curtain is digitally printed with collaged images of the glass in ‘Gradient_Shift’. Small details are dramatically enlarged, transforming a blob of glass into a tongue and a nipple, and images are multiplied and pixelated. The micro becomes the macro. An edited facsimile hangs like a screen before its original source.

Damaris Athene is studying MA Ceramics & Glass at the Royal College of Art thanks to the Marit Rausing Scholarship. She graduated with a distinction in MA Fine Art from City & Guilds of London Art School in 2023, studying thanks to the Leverhulme Scholarship, and with a BA(Hons) in Painting from Camberwell College of Arts in 2015. Athene won the CGLAS Prize for Outstanding MA Fine Art Exhibition in 2023 and received a CuratorSpace Bursary in 2021. Athene has been shortlisted for multiple prizes: New Contemporaries, New Blood Emerging Art Prize (Nominated) (2024); Robert Walters UK New Artist of the Year Award hosted by the Saatchi Gallery, New Emergence Prize, THE TAGLI 01.23 Collection and Mentorship Award (2023); NOW Introducing 2022 Art Prize (2022); La Vienisima’s Feminist Photography Prize (2021); BEEP Painting Prize (2018); Clyde & Co. Art Award (2025); and Hans Brinker Painting Prize (2014).

Athene has exhibited internationally in America, Germany, Italy, South Korean, Russia, Portugal, and the Netherlands. Recent group shows include: In Loving Memory, Guts Gallery Project Space, London, UK (2024); Unveiling Abstractions, Hypha HQ, London, UK (2024); Robert Walters UK New Artist of the Year Award, Saatchi Gallery, London, UK (2023); Adjacent Colours, D Contemporary, London, UK (2023); Bodies, Gluttony and Me, Pictorum Gallery, London, UK (2023); current/s, MeetFrida at PHOTOPIA, Hamburg, Germany (2023); NOW Introducing, Studio West Gallery, London, UK (2022); BEYOND IMAGE, MeetFrida at Triennial Der Photographie, Hamburg, Germany (2022); A BODY: FIGURE AND FLESH, FLOOR_, Seoul, South Korea (2022); Our New World, ArtGirlRising x Subject Matter x FORA, London, UK (2022); Warmth, Stay Home Gallery, Paris, Tennessee, USA (2022). Solo shows include: All Trussed Up and Nowhere to Go, ] G A Z E [ Art Space, Shrewsbury (2022); Cheer Up Love, Peterhouse, Cambridge University, Cambridge (2019); I Shall Walk Softly There, Wigan S.T.E.A.M., Wigan (2018). Athene founded the blog Private View where she interviews women & non-binary artists.