Damaris Athene

Damaris Athene is our 2025 arts scholar. Damaris will take part in the exchange programme travelling from the Royal College of Art to Konstfack in spring 2025. Damaris has most recently been studying for an MA in Ceramics & Glass at the Royal College of Art. Prior to this she also studied for an MA in Fine Art at the City & Guilds of London Art School. Her degree was in Painting at Camberwell College of Arts. 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, performance, photography, and digital collage, often accumulating in installations. "I would like to continue developing my work using glass powders with water and to experiment with combining this with foamed glass. I have done lots of testing to explore the water and foaming techniques, but I have only scratched the surface of their potential. By using glass powders with water, I am able to use the surface tension of water to manipulate the glass into rounded shapes without the need for moulds, and by adding a foaming agent to glass, I am able to expand glass with bubbles, making it appear as a frothing vibrant material that doesn’t resemble glass. I’m fascinated by how I can collaborate with the material agency of glass to make lumpy, amorphous forms that speak to the posthuman, imagining a future hybrid species and its future fossil." "I have been doing extensive colour testing to build up a ‘palette’ of colours so that I am able to ‘paint’ with the glass with greater accuracy as the colours of the glass change dramatically in the kiln. I am experimenting with colours that have the potential to react with each other, giving further agency to the glass and creating unexpected results. I want to continue this research, feeding it into my work with the water and foaming techniques."