Demeter Dykes: Stuff and Nonsense

BIO – Demeter Dykes

Demeter Dykes lives and works in Dorset. Her practice revolves around making with materials that are intrinsic to her everyday life. Within this, the act of making is devotional and mostly at odds with the banality of the material which can be anything from old, shredded bills to empty tea bags and brown paper packaging to heavy weight printmaking papers. This waste is handled and manipulated to reveal a potential that reaches so much further than its humble origins suggest. Gentle humour and a sense of non-sense interweave with the attention to details of surface, line and texture. Futility, fear, hope and joy are inseparable in the work.

Demeter is a shortlisted artist for the current Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize 2020-21 and is a funded participating installation artist for Bournemouth Emerging Arts Fringe 2019/21.

She is also a lecturer at Arts University Bournemouth.

After over a year, we’re finally allowed to have people over, and Demeter was able to come by to install her show in person. Welcome to the inner (kitchen) sanctum Demeter!

Demeter was pleased with how the installations were looking with the ambient light streaming in from the windows on that very sunny afternoon, so for now, we’re showing images from those lighting conditions. We will also document what it looks like with all the lights on. It changes completely.

There is also some surprise bonus experimental video footage in the pipeline that Demeter is working on at the time of writing, so if that works out, it will be added here. (Hint, it’s not the video below with Foals playing in the background on Radio 6 Music)

^{Foals is performing ‘What Went Down’ in the background on Radio 6 Music (DBA Radio) – It can be made silent if there’s an issue with copyright or whatever, but this isn’t for commercial use – at all – so hopefully it’s ok.
(Dear Sony, Warner, and all the rest: Please don’t sue us, we are completely broke! And would never survive debtors prison. Cheers.)}