Ismene King (b. 1993) is a sculptress and ceramist based in Athens.
She is a graduate of the Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts (2014) and holds an MFA in sculpture from the Slade School of Fine Art (UCL, University of London, 2017. Through her practice, she explores emotion and embodiment as a methodology for creating work responding to her surroundings and to subjective as well as collective experiences, such as mourning, trauma, femininity, eroticism and relatedness perceived as potent, active conditions.
Selected exhibitions include: True Love Leaves No Traces, Galerist, Istanbul (2022); Encounters in wreath-knot-chain formations, solo exhibition, The Breeder Gallery, Athens (2021); (dis)placement, shown at Off-Quay in London and at Jacaranda in Rio de Janeiro (2017); and Backwards+Forwards, Casa Dona Laura, Lisbon (2016). She has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS.
Parallel to, and as integral part of her individual practice, she has been developing a collaborative practice with the visual artist Ileana Arnaoutou, since 2019, which focuses on sculptural and community forming practices, based on co-making as an embodied and subjective way of relating with one another, and their surroundings. They approach their collaboration as an extension of their personal practices and a result of an urgency to contemplate around issues such as embodied femininity and loss as a potent and porous situation, notions which they consider essential to unravel in a collaborative manner. They have been awarded the 2022 GnA Mamidakis Foundation Art Prize for their in situ sculptural installation 'Tender shell geophilia'. As an artist duo they created the in-situ installation 'A Conservation of Water-Writings' at ATOPOS cvc, as a commission work for 'The Office of the Hydrocommons' with the support of the GnA Mamidakis Foundation and Atopos cvc. Since 2023 the artistic duo have beendeveloping research sculptural project with curator Olympia Tzortzi, based on the aftermath material of a destroyed wind turbine blade. This project culminated in a series of works that where showcased as part of the One Work Series in October 2023 at Callirrhoe, titled 'All the sticks, spears and swords, blades entwined', and as part of their first solo show as an artistic duo at Alkinois in March 2024, titled 'I will hold you forever. Or till everyone leaves the room.'