Title: Garden of Purity
Year: 2018
Length: Various
Format: Digital video
Garden of Purity considers how we read and ingest imagery, drawing links through history from art history to advertising. Duffy sees the works as being a layered conversation about Catholicism, advertising, abjection, and queerness. She uses edible materials as a starting point for the series of digitally manipulated photographs in the light boxes and online video works. The series intends to prompt questions about traditional notions of beauty and divinity by blurring the lines between repulsion and desire.
Thematic tags: Performance, narrative, body, abstraction, new media, technology, sound, spirituality, indigenous methodologies.
Laura Duffy’s photographic and video works explore the objectification of the feminine body. Using food as a sculptural material, she draws on gestural techniques found within the world of modern advertising including dripping, dropping, pouring and slow motion. With reference to art historical still life, the work asserts positive identification of women and femmes as subject over object as well as exposing the abject treatment of the feminine image throughout history.