Damaris Athene

‘Fruiting_Bodies’ imagines a future hybrid body, exploring the entanglement of humans, animals, plants, fungi, the environment and technology. Sculptures sit between human and non-human, digital and physical, organic and synthetic, soft and hard, flesh and rock, painting and sculpture. Airbrushed fabric bulges out and pinches in creating orifices, with colours recalling the aesthetics of digital imagery and soft femme culture. The sculptures interfere with your perception, appearing both 2D and 3D with paint layered over natural shadows blurring the line between the real and fake, while a moiré effect from the weave of the fabric makes the surface pulsate. Small glass domes hide in crevices, shining out at you like glowing red eyes, while large glass domes erupt out of folds of fabric, bulging and growing out of soft synthetic flesh with lattices of coloured glass on the top reminiscent of frog spawn or insect eyes. This coloured lattice is made through a collaboration with the material agency of glass, and holes are created through the effects of surface tension. The viewer is reflected in the mirrored glass base of the glass domes, blurring the line between object and viewer, and the colours of the glass domes are reflected in their fabric surroundings. Is this a healing or infecting force? Are these domes alien eggs, tumours, or portals to another world?

Damaris Athene (b. 1992, 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. 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 the Royal College of Arts with an MA in Ceramics and Glass and from City & Guilds with an MA in Fine Art.

Solo exhibitions include: 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: A Landscape of Chance, SLQS Gallery, UK (2024), 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).