Overall Duvall's work investigates speech acts (such as, confessions, gossip and expressions of regret), the nature of truth, the process of grieving, intimacy and vulnerability.
Audience members were invited to participate in these public readings, while visual footage of Duvall involved in a violent police incident was visible in the room.
The work, She Can't Begin (2007, Red Head Gallery), presented the artist's own words in response to her 23-year-old son's suicide superimposed on video images of the prairie landscape of his death.
Critical reactions to the project questioned the way the participants, who were visually identifiable in the exhibition and educational materials, were presented as wilfully circulating illicit methods of survival.
[11][13] Also in 2012, a solo exhibition entitled The Toss (Gallery TPW) took up again Duvall's personal experience with police violence, the media footage of which had been frequently broadcast in local TV advertising and was included in her 2005 work, Lament.
In The Unacknowledged (2016, Remai Modern Art Gallery), she invited artists as well as theologians, poets, lawyers, inmates, filmmakers, health care workers and street-involved women to produce commemorative panels for individuals whose bodies were not identified after death.