Damaris Athene GBA

Damaris Athene (b.1992, UK) lives and works in London. Her transdisciplinary practice focuses on the posthuman and how digital technology affects perceptions of bodily materiality. Through an exploration of feminist posthuman theory, Athene reexamines hierarchies in a post-anthropocentric world, blurring the borders between humans and more-than-humans. She is interested in what embodied experience can communicate when language fails us. Her work inhabits liminal space, slipping between the real/unreal, and swimming through permeable boundaries between bodies, the organic/synthetic, the digital/physical, and 2D/3D space. Work transmutes from painting to sculpture, photography, digital collage, and 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. 

Soft sculptures entice with their erotic corporeal forms painted with airbrushed gradients of colour. Photographs question authenticity through multi-layered re-staging of artworks in natural environments, while digital collages obscure the border between the digital and physical. Glass embodies the non-binary and bursts through soft fabric, appearing as tumours/eggs/portals/mucus, or coalesces like mineral or bodily deposits on laser-cut metal. Flat airbrushed paintings oscillate between 2D and 3D space while metal is a support or constraint, referencing medical and digital technologies. Parasitic installations invade rooms, combining soft sculpture and glass. Membranes stretch, concealing what lies beneath.

Damaris Athene graduated from MA Ceramics & Glass at the Royal College of Art (2024, Marit Rausing Scholarship), MA Fine Art at City & Guilds of London Art School (2023, Leverhulme Scholarship) and BA(Hons) Painting at Camberwell College of Arts (2015). Athene is a winner of the Gilbert Bayes Award (2026), won the CGLAS Prize for Outstanding MA Fine Art Exhibition (2023), and received a CuratorSpace Bursary (2021). Athene has been shortlisted for multiple prizes: New Contemporaries, New Blood Emerging Art Prize (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 (2015); and Hans Brinker Painting Prize (2014). In 2025 Athene was selected for the RCA/Konstfack Exchange supported by the Anglo Swedish Society in Stockholm (Sweden), the Werkstattwocke Residency in Lüben (Germany) and the GIRLPOWER Residency, co-founded and supported by Marcelle Joseph and Kimberly Morris in Salles (France).

Solo exhibitions include: Undercurrents, SLQS Gallery, London (2025); Women in Art Fair, SLQS Gallery, London (2024); All Trussed Up and Nowhere to Go, ] G A Z E [ Art Space, Shrewsbury (2022); Cheer Up Love, Peterhouse, Cambridge (2019); I Shall Walk Softly There, Wigan S.T.E.A.M., Wigan (2018). Recent group exhibitions include: Who Runs the World, The Bomb Factory Art Foundation, London (2025); MEGA Art Fair, SLQS Gallery, Milan, Italy (2025); In/Visible: The Changing Shape of Womanhood, Galerie de l’Est, Compiègne, France (2025); In Loving Memory, Guts Gallery Project Space, London (2024); Unveiling Abstractions, Hypha HQ, London (2024); Robert Walters UK New Artist of the Year Award, Saatchi Gallery, London (2023); Adjacent Colours, D Contemporary, London, UK (2023); current/s, MeetFrida at PHOTOPIA, Hamburg, Germany (2023); BEYOND IMAGE, MeetFrida at Triennial Der Photographie, Hamburg, Germany (2022); A BODY: FIGURE AND FLESH, FLOOR_, Seoul, South Korea (2022); Warmth, Stay Home Gallery, Paris, Tennessee, USA (2022).