Talking about her process in her own words Duffy says:
Making art has always been my way of surviving, making visual the things I cannot say and giving expression to life – the living, loving, suffering and dying. Memories and trauma emerge from the dark bog-hole of my subconscious and are transformed. The studio is a physical and psychic space into which ideas seep, mutate and transform into the possible. Drawing is my first language. Thoughts gradually emerge through the craft of pencil and pen, colliding with the impulse of urgent everyday lived experience. Drawings are made as meditation towards the fusion moment and always there is hope a new idea will appear. The past, present and future float through the emotional mind, connections are made, an exploratory line spun through fingers spills onto the page. Certainty gives way to openness and a fragile artwork takes on its own shape. Painting for me is a form of magic, that urges outward expression of what is being experienced internally.