Demi Danka (b.1996) is a British artist based in London and a recipient of the Sir Frank Bowling Scholarship at the Royal College of Art 2024/25. Danka explores the volatile presence of time, human existence and how matter shifts, breaks down, and endures. Her practice engages with material agency and instability, harnessing the transformative potential of chemical reactions and elemental forces. Time is both a medium and subject, working with light-sensitive surfaces and volatile solutions, she navigates a process shaped by change, urgency and limitation. A race against time before the painting reaches overexposure or collapse. This urgency and fragility are also rooted in her formative experiences raised in inner City London.

 

Drawing on notions of expanded painting and experimental photography, Danka’s paintings honour “the physics of painting and the chemistry of photography” formulating a process that is cameraless and requires the manipulation of paint infused surfaces rather than traditionally applying paint onto canvas. Danka’s materials are inherently ephemeral: light, water, air, earth, and gravity act as co-creators, shifting densities and tonalities in real time as unfolding events. Elements capable of sustaining life in balance but destructive in excess. Each painting becomes a site of tension, her interventions halt reactions at the edge of obliteration, a precarious act of preservation. The practice is a meditation on resilience, on how we endure, adapt, and persist in the face of inevitable change. This is evident in the scars, scratches and excavations across the painted surfaces.

 

“These surfaces are alive, they transform, reject, accept and surrender, as do I. A duet in the act of becoming”. – Demi Danka