“Wade through an undulating, gelatinous landscape, both familiar and uncanny, in which these Body Objects are laid out, quivering and bare, like an adult-store mega warehouse, melting in a summer heatwave.
Mounds shiver. Nipples pop. Slime bubbles. Devoy’s Body Objects are indecently alive. They lie trembling on the brink of apprehension, inviting the viewer into a slow and intimate dance, teasing and eluding, in erotic pastiche and soft pink seriousness. Deliciously tactile, it’s impossible not to want to reach out and touch. To flick. To stroke. To blow. To slap. The viewer becomes voyeur, subject in a sea of possible nouns.
Body Objects recontextualizes the soft, yielding carcasses of voluptuous femininity, rendered luxuriantly passive by 30,000 years of Western art history. Taut silicone breasts with pert nipples act as light switches, conduits of an implied electricity. There is nothing dainty or modest about the racks on display and there’s also something slightly kitsch about them, like an item you might expect to find in John Waters’s summer home.
Phallic recorders dangle. Instead of vibrating silicone pleasure rods, or the modestly chiselled packages of classical dignity, they are endearingly, comically limp. Great flaccid cockflutes, exquisitely rendered in translucent silicone, as though wilted in a great orchestra fire. Equipped with requisite mouthpieces and delicate tone holes, begging to be played, the sculptures are undeniably funny. There’s a strange combination of emasculation and tenderness about them, like some rare, blind cave-dwelling amphibian, growing lungs and lurching inelegantly out of the primordial soup.
Devoy's work is full of startling contradictions. Both viscerally unnerving and oddly seductive. Pornographic and neutered. Excoriating and tender. Hilariously, decadently camp, but with a deadly serious intent. They are utterly fresh yet somehow ancient, like a pair of nipple tassels fluttering in a primaeval breeze.” NZ poet, Hera Lindsay Bird
