Damaris 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. Feminist posthuman theory offers an opportunity to reexamine hierarchies in a post-anthropocentric world, blurring the borders between humans and non-humans. 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. Work transmutes from painting to sculpture, photography, digital collage, and installations.
Athene’s practice mutates and evolves, feeding itself like the ouroboros and mirroring the unrelenting regurgitation of imagery on the internet. She explores the fluid interconnections of matter and life, the entanglement of humans, animals, the environment and technology. 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.
Soft sculptures entice with their erotic corporeal forms painted with airbrushed gradients of colour. Photographs question authenticity with multi-layered re-staging of artworks in natural environments, while digital collages obscure the border between the digital and physical. Glass embodies the non-binary and bursts through soft fabric, appearing as tumours/eggs/portals, or coalesces like mineral or bodily deposits on laser-cut metal. Flat airbrushed paintings oscillate between 2D and 3D space while metal is a support or constraint, referencing medical and digital technologies.