Damaris Athene: mutable_ground: In the Viewing Room

Drawing on feminist posthuman thought, Damaris Athene challenges distinctions between organic and synthetic, digital and physical. Her works inhabit the unstable spaces between these categories: bodily fragments merge with technologies, surfaces slip between two and three dimensions, and materials appear simultaneously seductive and unsettling, with the resulting objects feeling both intimate and alien.
 
Something or someone that is mutable is subject to change — fluid, shifting and never quite fixed. The exhibition’s title suggests the body, particularly the more-than-human body, as a mutable ground: not something separate or self-contained, but a permeable space where human, animal, fungal, vegetal and environmental merge. Athene invites us into this uncertain space where familiar boundaries dissolve and embodied experience offers ways of knowing beyond what language can express.

Damaris Athene (b. 1992, Bristol) 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). 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). 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).