Art World Women – Details, episodes & analysis

Welcome to the Art World Women Podcast! 🎨👑💫

I’m Zoë Goetzmann (@byzoesera), an arts writer and curator based in📌 London 🇬🇧, and the host of the Art World Women podcast.

This show is dedicated to conversations with women, female-identifying, and non-binary artists, art professionals, and cultural leaders who are shaping the art world today. Together, we’ll celebrate their stories, amplify their voices, and explore how they’re redefining art and culture.

✨ Stay tuned — new episodes are coming soon on Apple Podcasts and Spotify!

🎙️ In this episode, I visited London-based artist Damaris Athene in her Woolwich studio, following her solo exhibition Undercurrents at SLQS Gallery.

🖼️ Her transdisciplinary practice spans painting, sculpture, and photography — exploring post-human ideas of the body, materiality, and the shifting boundaries between the physical and digital.

🧠 Informed by science, science fiction, and film, her work draws on references from Stranger Things and The Last of Us, alongside cinematic influences from Alfred Hitchcock to Darren Aronofsky, as well as the speculative and feminist writing of Octavia Butler — imagining "new possibilities" while confronting structures of "injustice", Athene says in our podcast chat.

🌱 We discuss her experiences working as a woman artist today; her practice across art, science, organic forms and technology; her involvement in the GIRLPOWER Residency in the South of France led by Marcelle Joseph and Kimberly Morris; and the need for greater transparency in the art world.

🔬 The conversation also explores new developments in her work — including the “Wood Wide Web" 🍄, an underground network of fungi and tree roots through which plants communicate and share resources — reflected in her root-like ceiling installation in Undercurrents at SLQS Gallery.

🚿 Her new body of work, import_copy, plays on the material and conceptual language of nature utilising sheer chiffon curtains — exploring ideas of permeability, visibility, and the boundary between private and public space.

✨ Damaris Athene is a London-based artist and graduate of the Royal College of Art and City & Guilds of London Art School. She has exhibited internationally through D Contemporary, Guts Gallery Project Space, Unveiling Abstractions (Hypha HQ - co-curated by myself & Melissa Vipritskaya Topal in 2024), Saatchi Gallery (the Robert Walters UK New Artist of the Year Award), MEGA Art Fair and Women in Art Fair in London as well as miart Art Fair in Milan with Bo Lee Gallery.

🎤 Hosted by Zoë Goetzmann (@byzoesera)

👉 Make sure to follow Damaris' work:

Instagram

Website

🔗 Resources

• Reference: Octavia Butler 📚

📢 As this episode was recorded live, please turn the volume up for a better listening experience 👏

🎙️ Recorded live at Hypha x Eastern City Studios (130 Fenchurch Street, London — on view until 16th May), this minisode features a women artists roundtable produced alongside (UN)SEEN — the inaugural exhibition at the space, showcasing 21 artists working and creating across the city.

🖼️ Curated by Art World Women host Zoë Goetzmann, (UN)SEEN explores the seen and unseen forces within contemporary artistic practice across painting, sculpture, design, and installation — moving beyond visibility to consider how artistic labour transcends disciplines, genres, and gender.

👥 Titled “(UN)SEEN Labour, Visual Art,” the roundtable is moderated by editorial stylist Megan McClelland and features artists Abbie Griffiths (@abbiegriffiths__), Anna Kolosova (@annakolosova), Ekaterina Adelskaya (@adelskaya_kate), Epona (a design brand established by Rhiannon Davies) (@epona______ ), and Ewelina Skowronska (@ewelello

🧠 The conversation draws on Arlie Russell Hochschild’s feminist concept of emotional labour exploring the invisible emotional and unseen labour within artistic practice — from materiality and inspiration to creative burnout and perceptions of being a woman artist today.

💭 It also reflects on visual culture, attention, and perception within a saturated image economy.

✨ (UN)SEEN also includes works by Claudia Pang, Cas Campbell, Emily Hana, Elena Unger, Elina Yumasheva, Hannah Kline, Hannah Shillito, Karolina Dworska, Lucie Davis, Olivia Foster and Taya De La Cruz, with reference to queer artist Adrian Coto within the discussion. 

🎤 Hosted by AWW host Zoë Goetzmann (@byzoesera)

🗣️ Also check out Megan McClelland's socials too (@meg_mcclelland)

References:

Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart

Marine Tanguy (CEO, MTArt Agency), The Visual Detox 

Welcome to "Art World Women" — a podcast dedicated to amplifying the voices and careers of women creatives and artists in today's art world. 🎨

🎤 I'm your host, Zoë Goetzmann (@byzoesera), and for our very first episode I sat down with Sarah Le Quang Sang (@sarahlqs) — Founder and Director of SLQS Gallery (@slqsgallery) — at her space on Club Row in East London, where this conversation took place. 

👤 SLQS Gallery is a contemporary art gallery committed to platforming women and queer artists across generations. Built around an inclusive and intentional ethos, the gallery actively pushes back on the art world's rigid labels — "emerging", "mid-career" — labels that so often fail artists working outside conventional timelines or balancing caregiving alongside their practice. Founded during International Women's Month, SLQS has been featured in The Art Newspaper and has participated in international art fairs including Minor Attractions and Women in Art Fair. 

💫 In this episode, we cover so much ground — Sarah's journey through the art, business and performance worlds; what drives her vision for SLQS Gallery; her recent exhibition with London artist "The Trung Sisters" Hoa Dung Clerget; and the gallery's current show "Au fil du temps" — bringing together the work of Damaris Athene, Lexia Hachtmann and Bethany Stead.

💡One of my favourite moments of the whole conversation? The idea of women's soft power 💜 — when it comes to creating and collecting art — and how women are stepping into their identities as empowered collectors in a very exciting way. This felt like such an important and timely conversation, and I can't wait for you to hear it.

🎥 Full video interview coming soon.

Follow SLQS Gallery: @slqsgallery

Website

"Au fil du temps" is on view at SLQS Gallery, 20 Club Row, Shoreditch, East London, until 11 April 2026.