MeetDamaris Athene

Damaris Athene’s transdiciplinary practice explores the Posthuman and how lived experience mediated through technology offers new ways of viewing the materiality of the body and understanding what the body could be. 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, performance, 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. Tactile padded paintings entice with their erotic corporeal forms, photographs question authenticity, and digital collages blur the border between the digital and physical. Glass sculptures are both liquid and solid, fragile yet strong, transparent yet impermeable. Membranes stretch, concealing what lies beneath. Athene is currently studying MA Ceramics & Glass at the Royal College of Art thanks to the Marit Rausing Scholarship. She graduated with an MA Fine Art from City & Guilds of London Art School in 2023, and with a BA(Hons) in Painting from Camberwell College of Arts in 2015. She was shortlisted for the Hans Brinker Painting Prize in Amsterdam in 2014, the Clyde & Co. Art Award in 2015, the BEEP Painting Prize in 2018, and La Vienisima’s feminist photography prize in 2021. Athene founded the blog Private View where she interviews women & non-binary artists.