AMY D'AGORNE

'Dance Yrself Clean' is a series of analogue photographs that document the artist's attempt to free herself of the abusive language of a past relationship.

After dismantling the bed that her and her partner had shared, she painted the bottom two bed-boards with black chalkboard paint that then become both the canvas and the dance floor on which the artist proceeded to write out the abusive language that was used against her in the relationship. The images show her bare feet as she proceeds to dance on top of the chalk words, her dancing becoming more erratic and joyful as the words are slowly blurred and danced clean.

Despite all her frantic dancing, there still remains some ghostly remains of the words etched in chalk on the black bed boards, the sentences fragmented but individual words still remaining legible.
The series speaks about themes of photography, performance, memory and healing.
As the fixing solution removes the light-reactive silver from a photographic negative and permanently commits the image to stasis, the photography in this series fixes in time a new collective memory of these hurtful words. No longer belonging to the person who hurled them like stones, but to the artist who reclaimed them as a part of a praxis of healing through photography and movement.