Current Project
Leo Duff’s current projects responds to the heritage of Montenegro.
Over hundreds of years Greeks,Romans,Turks,Venetians,Spanish, Austrian, French, Austro-Hungarians, the armed forces of WWII and latterly Bosniaks, Serbs and tourists from all over Europe specially Russia, have come and gone leaving their mark on the coast, land and life in Montenegro. The population has doubled since the 1920's and is now close to 625,000. The steep rise in tourism brings many more visitors than inhabitants with over 2 million, and rising by 13% annually.
Leo Duff has focused on these movements of people and what they have left behind, altered or removed. Thus themes such as positive and negative space, memory and trace, materiality and interpretation of object are part of the make-up of the drawings, paintings and ceramic objects created.
Her starting point was examining textile and ceramic objects and clothing, domestic and personal, in use and held in museum collections. These images are based on hand made flags damaged in battle in the collections of the National Museum in Cetinje, and domestic textile artefacts in the archives of Herceg Novi Museum.
Buildings ranging from 15thC fortresses to World War II pill boxes combined with aged and contemporary building materials 'naturalised' by the sea inspired the ceramic pieces, small sculptures intended to be handled. Much of the ceramics project was carried out as an Artist in Residence 2014-2015 and 2017/18 at UCA Farnham and now concluding at Songbird Ceramics, Co Antrim.
Leo's current series is about plastic flotsam and jetsam.
