The Hard and the Faithful examines how fantasy is constructed through acts of copying. Working across metal forging, installation, and video, Láura Viruly approaches sculpture as a form of world-building that exposes the machinery behind spectacle.

The project emerges from visits to sites of performative display across South Africa : casinos, carnivals, circuses, roadside attractions, malls, and other hyperreal environments that stage myths through excess ornament, theatrical lighting, and serial decoration. In these spaces, copying operates as a symbolic technology: recycled motifs and replicas neutralise the origins of cultural imagery to manufacture belief. The implications of these naturalised Western motifs as entertainment props in the South African context is a critical inquiry.

Viruly responds materially by forging aluminium over concrete garden ornaments, producing hollow metal replicas of mass-produced objects (often badly cast greco-roman figures). During the process the cement originals collapse under the force of the mallet, losing integrity as the metal shell takes form. Each sculpture therefore records an act of copying that simultaneously preserves and destroys its source.

Installed as a series of constructed “rooms,” the exhibition stages sculptural fragments that echo the atmospheres of spectacle. Forged vessels, stained glass, LED illumination, and drifting assemblages merge ecclesiastical and commercial logics into a single prism of enchantment. These works hover between sacred relic, decorative ornament, and industrial debris.

Through these gestures, Viruly proposes copying as both a method and a critique. Replication becomes a way to test when repetition erodes meaning and when it transforms it. The Hard and the Faithful ultimately presents sculpture as a material blueprint of fantasy — revealing spectacle not simply as an aesthetic, but as a symbolic machine that constructs belief.