Across her multidisciplinary practice, which includes sculpture, print, sound, and film, Diamond conceives of the body as a ‘primordial workplace’, often through the prism of sex work and other forms of invisible labour. Within her sculpture and installation works, the artist recasts objects and items of clothing used within her practice as a sex worker. This material reframing takes place as the artist prints onto sheets borrowed from London hotels, re-casts elements of interior décor from her places of work, prints or records imagery and speech from pornographic films, or casts props such as lingerie or Cowboy hats employed during sessions with clients. Often working with layered casting methods, using jesmonite, plaster, latex or bronze to imitate an object, the artist explores processes that are repetitive and reproductive. The labour, attention, and care required by Diamond’s process are imbued with meaning, and with connection, as though recreating a dynamic of intimate transaction between the viewer and the artwork.
There is a tension between the intimacy of care and the performance of fantasy in her work. Diamond understands this as the ‘synthesis of authenticity’, where the sex worker becomes a constantly shifting Foucauldian ‘heterotopia’ for the client, an illicit space of illusion and compensation removed from the public sphere. Her creative practice engages with the impermanence of sex work, an experience economy that often leaves no traces and is unseen yet ever-present. Disengaging from the erotic, her practice brings awareness to ideas of transactional intimacy and the subjective experience of affection within an anonymous production of fantasy.