About

Duffy is a multi-disciplinary artist working in paint, sculpture, lens-based work, moving image and installation. He draws lines and also crosses lines, both physically and metaphysically while investigating psychological and physical displacement. His work considers strategies of movement, restrictions, and exclusion of human beings with focused attention given to spaces such as occupied territories, buffer zones, non-places, surveillances, systems, the internet and our minds through mapping and mark making. 

"His work has always hovered over the worlds of the political and the personal.  In these dense and beautiful tracking of a chess game between human and machine minds, he encourages us to think of Games, all kinds of games, War games, where territories are moved, peoples are shoved around like so many chess pieces; the overlapping of interests; the displacement of mind and body, of cultures, of belief systems.  But these structuralist kind of overlapping surfaces could be as much sophisticated abstractionism as they are the actual record of game moves.  And I love that complexity in his work; a totally committed social conscience and a totally committed personal vision." Alice Maher  

Duffy’s practice investigates the natural world seeping through the cracks of urban surfaces, attempting to reclaim spaces back from humans as a gentle reminder of our own impermanence and fragility. His method of art making begins by walking the streets extracting samples of plants which pierce through the urban surfaces. He brings the cuttings back to his studio to prepare and manipulate them with staining chemicals before placing them on glass slides under his microscope for examination. The resulting sealed glass slides inform his paintings, small scale sculptures and photographs as he magnifies microscopic details of life, revealing some forgotten, mythical, or hidden dark elements of our society in the process. He retains a specific interest in the role of fertilisers, phosphates and root development.

Duffy’s playful attitude to materials and situations counterbalances a very serious social conscience and political intent. Essentially, he explores the survival of species in deteriorating and evolving eco-systems.