Artist Talk: Damaris Athene in conversation with Claire Mander

Damaris Athene is joined by Claire Mander to discuss the research and materiality in her practice, as part of her solo exhibition Undercurrents at SLQS Gallery. Informed by research spanning volcanoes, science fiction, feminist posthuman phenomenology, mycology and water, Undercurrents considers the unknowability of the insides of our bodies, our minds, and the depths of the oceans and the earth. Presenting three new bodies of work - a large scale site-specific textile and glass installation, and two wall-based series featuring expanded photography and glass  - this conversation will explore how Athene's research translates materially. 

 

Free event with limited capacity, RSVP is essential

 

 

Damaris Athene (b. UK) lives and works in London. 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. Work transmutes from painting to sculpture, photography, digital collage, and installations. 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. 

 

Athene graduated from MA in Ceramics and Glass (2024) at the Royal College of Arts (Marit Rausing Scholarship) and MA in Fine Art (2023) from City & Guilds Of London Art School (Leverhulme Scholarship). She won the CGLAS Prize for Outstanding MA Fine Art Exhibition (2023) and received a CuratorSpace Bursary (2021). 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).

Claire Mander is the founder and curator of theCOLAB a curatorial practice that since 2011 has provided artists with rare opportunities to use unusual public sites to realise their most far-flung and life-affirming work. She launched the Artist’s Garden, the world’s first and only sculpture garden dedicated to the work of women artists, in 2021, transforming a neglected half acre roof terrace by the Thames. Following the success of the conference ‘Taking Place: Women Artists in Public Spaces’ in June this year, the project will form the central case study for a collaborative research project with Dr Kate McMillan/King’s College London. theCOLAB also runs an annual exploratory drawing residency, BODY and PLACE, which takes life drawing into the context of the landscape in the West Country and beyond. She continues to commission works in the landscapte across the 100 miles of Morecambe Bay in collaboration with Deco Publique.

 

Beyond theCOLAB, she sits on the panels of Westminster City of Sculpture and Emma Cons Gardens Public Art Commission; is a Board Member of the National Festival of Making in Blackburn and artist-led 303 Projects in Lowestoft, Suffolk.