Darya Diamond

Lives and works in London, UK

Artist statement

Darya Diamond (b. 1991) is a Mexican-American artist working across print, sculpture, and installation. She explores literal and symbolic figurations of the body as a primordial workplace. Her practice is ritually and theoretically rooted in methods of reproduction, regenerating and renegotiating the promise of transactional intimacy, care, and invisible labor. Layered methods of printmaking and cast sculpture become portraits of transactional intimacy and the thresholds that mediate how and where closeness is negotiated. The nexus of her work is grounded in re-appropriating and recontextualizing transactional intimacy as a gesture of care. Bedsheets taken from hotels, motels, and apartments become diaries of labor and memory. The work moves between rented rooms and domestic space, tracing how her labor as a sex worker shifts between the pathology of loneliness, vulnerability, the sacred landscapes of the erotic, and the contradictory subjectivities involved in sustaining bodies and minds. How is the body a site of mutual aid, power, pleasure, and labor? Where the body is a workplace, these bed sheets act as a record of that work—marked not only by a physical exchange but also by layers of block prints and screenprints of pornography, symbols, Mexican iconography, and personal photos. They hold traces of encounters that normally disappear without evidence, turning something private and often ignored into an object of attention. The bedsheets remind us that desire, faith,...

Artwork