Presented at SLQS Gallery, Damaris Athene’s solo exhibition Undercurrents explores what happens beneath the surface. - - - infiltrate - - -, __deepcopy and diffract/ / are three new bodies of work that seep through the surface of the earth, water, our skins and our minds.
How can we rethink our bodies, our interactions with the more-than-humans around us and the impacts of digital technology, often mistaken as intangible? At a time of global turmoil and climate crisis, Undercurrents invites us to reflect on our embodied existence and its deep entanglement with the world around us.
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).
Solo exhibitions include: 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). Athene founded the blog Private View where she interviews artists who are women or non-binary.