Katie Torn’s These Rocks Won’t Lose Their Shape is a 3D animation created as an endless loop that depicts a blonde stereotypical barbie figure who poses among “under the sea” props and plastic debris. The camera pans up and down her enticing but somewhat diseased body, discoloured by a toxic environment as she smiles among plastic infused rocks and plastic beads.

The piece is a continuation of Torn’s virtual sculpture work that features female structures whose function are to simultaneously attract while repelling, mashing together ideals of feminine beauty with noxious consumer-made waste. The positioning and movements of the camera was borrowed from a video clip that Torn had found on a stock photography website using the search term “attractive female”. The artist was drawn to the way the camera inspected and displayed the female body like an object and a product in the found video clip. The title of the piece refers to the Marilyn Monroe film Gentleman Prefer Blondes (1953), while making a tongue-in-cheek point about the state of our changing geology.