Damaris Athene

Damaris Athene’s transdiciplinary practice explores the Posthuman and how lived experience mediated through technology offers new ways of viewing the materiality of the body and understanding what the body could be. Her work inhabits liminal space, slipping between the real and unreal, and swimming through the permeable boundaries of the body, the organic and synthetic, the digital and physical, and 2D/3D space. Work transmutes from painting to sculpture, performance, photography, and digital collage, accumulating in self-referential installations. 

 

Athene’s practice mutates and evolves, feeding itself like the ouroboros and mirroring the unrelenting regurgitation of imagery on the internet. She explores “intra-actions” between meaning and matter and the entanglement of bodies. 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. 

 

Tactile padded paintings entice with their erotic corporeal forms, photographs question authenticity, and digital collages blur the border between the digital and physical. Glass sculptures are both liquid and solid, fragile yet strong, transparent yet impermeable. Membranes stretch, concealing what lies beneath.