“Tout ce que j’ai vécu continue d’exister quelque part / All that I have lived continues to exist somewhere.” - Annie Ernaux, The Years (2008)
SLQS Gallery presents Au fil du temps, an exhibition of new works by the recipients of the 2025 GIRLPOWER Residency co-founded by Marcelle Joseph and Kimberly Morris.
Last September, as summer days shortened and the seasons shifted, Damaris Athene, Lexia Hachtmann and Bethany Stead spent a month in Pech Gris, a house built in 1401 in the Aquitaine, a region of the South West of France. The surrounding hills are undulating and vast,
bordered by fields of decaying sunflowers, their heads bent low. In the garden, a chorus of frogs rises from a pond beside the silence reserved for ancestors buried under old tombstones just a few steps away. Here time is felt and visible through distance travelled. In preparation for the residency, the artists pre-ordered art supplies to be delivered to their remote home in the
French countryside. They sourced their food through road trips to local markets in medieval villages, traversing landscapes marked by historical ruins, exposed sedimentary earth, and natural pigment deposits. A voyage beneath the surface in the local caves opened onto explorations of deep time. In the Gouffre de Padirac and the Grottes de Presque, stalactites, stalagmites, draperies and cauliflower concretions have formed over hundreds of thousands to millions of years.
In The Years, Annie Ernaux meditates on time, memory and the concept of collective autobiography. Social, cultural and political change cannot be measured within a single
lifetime but unfolds across generations. While we can only experience our own singular existence, it becomes one layer in the complex strata of society. Au fil du temps reflects on the artists’ time spent as visual archaeologists. Feeling and being in the landscape inhabited by humans and more than humans, attending to its existence and transformation over time.
At Lascaux, visitors encounter a reproduction of the cave and its prehistoric artworks. Athene’s new series of oil paintings, coreModule, depicts cave formations resembling the internal body. Employing a meticulous blending technique that resembles the processes of printing or airbrushing, her work references the perfect digital imagery that we view online, a reproduction
rendered “better” than the original. Hachtmann’s paintings attempt to halt a moment in time,
preserving its aura and energy. Her figures feel anachronistic; boundaries are blurred between bodies and landscape. Through the act of rubbing and scratching paint from the canvas, she returns to a form of primal mark making. Researching invisible and psychosomatic layers, as well as the social history of sumptuary laws in France, Bethany Stead’s imagery is atmospheric and crepuscular. Disheveled figures buried, carved, flayed and bound. Her new series of paintings and ceramics seep with art historical reference to the rural area. Sex, death, and seclusion emerge as themes, where post-human protagonists and hybrid figures populate the surface,
relief or three-dimensional plane. Ernaux writes "Like sexual desire, memory never stops. It pairs the dead with the living, real with imaginary beings, dreams with history".
For Hachtmann, the residency became a cave where time slowed down, a womb of healing and regeneration. For Athene and Stead, it marked a period of exploration, in which painting re-emerged as an expanded medium in their respective practices. In the ethereal world that these
three artists have collectively created, our very own existence as individuals and as a species is reflected through the passage of time. As Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in his novel L'Âge de raison (The Age of Reason, 1945) “Exister, c’est se boire sans soif / To exist is to drink oneself
without thirst”.
The GIRLPOWER Collection and Residency
The GIRLPOWER Collection is a collecting partnership founded in 2012 between London-based independent curator Marcelle Joseph and Zurich-based lawyer and businesswoman Kimberly Morris who is currently Chief People, Technology & Services Officer at FIFA. This 50:50 collecting partnership supports female-identifying and non-binary artists through the acquisition of their work at the early stages of their careers.
In 2023, Joseph and Morris founded the GIRLPOWER Residency located in a medieval hilltop property dating back to the 13th century near Bergerac in the Aquitaine region of southwestern France. As an extension of their collection, Joseph and Morris have devised this annual one-month residency to give female-identifying and non-binary artists the space and time for research and experimentation in the hills around the Lot-Garonne rivers. The thrust of the programme emanates from the desire of GIRLPOWER Collection to extend their patronage beyond the purchase of art to personal involvement with the artists themselves. The relationship
between the artist-in-residence and the host is an important aspect of this programme. The mission at the GIRLPOWER Residency is to provide early-career artists with an opportunity to slow down and centre their focus on their practice without the stress of deadlines and life in a big city. They invite artists to immerse themselves in the history and culture of the area that dates back to the Knights of Templar and to take in the breathtaking views and nature around the property. Located in the rural countryside, the GIRLPOWER Residency invites artists to
engage in a quieter and more isolated environment that will ideally launch a new development in their practice.
Damaris Athene (b. UK) lives and works in London. Her transdisciplinary practice focuses on the posthuman and how digital technology affects perceptions of bodily materiality. Through an exploration of feminist posthuman theory, Athene reexamines hierarchies in a post-anthropocentric world, blurring the borders between humans and more-than-humans. Her work inhabits liminal space, slipping between the real/unreal, and swimming through permeable boundaries between bodies, the organic/synthetic, the digital/physical, and 2D/3D space. Work transmutes from painting to sculpture, photography, digital collage, and installations.
Damaris Athene 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). 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). 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 [ ArtSpace, 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).
Lexia Hachtmann (b. Germany) is a British-German painter and printmaker who lives and works in Berlin. She completed her Art and Design Foundation Diploma in 2013 in Brighton and returned to Berlin to continue her studies in Fine Art Painting at Universität der Künste Berlin. Here, she obtained a Meisterschüler degree in the painting class of Prof. Mark Lammert in July 2021. Lexia Hachtmann is alumna of the 2022 Goldrausch Künstlerinnenprojekt and in 2024 completed a Master of Fine Art (MA) in Painting at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, London, for which she received the DAAD Grant.
Solo exhibitions include Waiting Room, Yve Yang Gallery, New Y ork, USA (2025); Out Of The Plain, Hew Hood Gallery, London (2025), HAZE, LKIF Gallery, Seoul, KO (2024), Es hing in der Luft wie, Galerie Mellis, Detmold, DE (2023). Recent group exhibitions include: Everyones had
dinner with Rabbit, DOD Gallery, Cologne, DE (2026), You and I, the Earth, SETAREH, Düsseldorf, DE (2025), Personal Showcase III, Rolando Anselmi Gallery, Rome, IT (2025), Give Me an Inch, Pipeline Contemporary, London, UK (2024), Nemesis, Yve Yang Gallery, New Y ork, USA (2024), I Opened the Curtain to See What Lays Behind, carlier I gebauer, Berlin, DE (2024), MENSCHENBILDER, carlier I gebauer, Madrid, ESP (2024), Eating my Head, 48 Stunden Neukölln, KINDL-Brauerei, Berlin, DE (2022), Mutual Matters - Goldrausch 2021,
Fahrbereitschaft, Berlin, DE (2021), FEELINGS ARE REAL (its true), Galerie Anton Janizewski, Berlin, DE (2021), Staycation, Galeria Catinca Tabacaru, Sandwich & Malmaison Studios, Bucharest, RO (2021).
Bethany Stead (b. UK) lives and works in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Through drawing, painting and sculpture, Stead uses figuration and personal visual language to disrupt our fragile social fabric. Her work is concerned with the sense of discomfort of inhabiting bodies, forming a kind of psychological dissection. She examines themes of health, hierarchy, deviance, worship, garment and the posthuman, filtered through the lens of class and sexuality.
Stead graduated from Newcastle University BA Fine Art (2019) and completed the NewBridge Project Collective Studio Programme (2021). She was awarded the Henry Moore Foundation Artist Award (2025), selected for Hogchester Arts Residency (2025), and the Girlpower Residency, South West France (2025). Solo and duo exhibitions include; 'Girdle', Cubism Artspace, Shanghai, China (2025); 'Sackcloth and Ashes', 36 Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne (2025); and 'Snatch a Thread', Moving Gallery, Sunderland, (2024). Selected group exhibitions include; '[uz], [uz], [uz]', The Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery, Leeds (2025); 'The
Omnipotence of Dream', Salford Art Gallery, Greater Manchester (2025); 'Antigone Revisited', Hypha Studios HQ, London (2024); and 'ING Discerning Eye', Mall Galleries, London (2024).
