Photography Film Video
Sarah McGlone
Soap and Poison
This project is made up of a series of documented performance pieces. These pieces were inspired by the poem Translation by Eilean ni Chuillean and eventually my own personal experiences. A line that stood out to me and inspired these performances was “water sank through rotten teeth of soap”, very quickly I was able to visualise a performance around this line. Working with soap, I started a cleansing ritual where I viciously clean my body- literally cleaning my body of its “sins”. These performances stirred a lot of emotions inside me, I felt a strong sense of guilt and shame. At first I was trying to feel what the girls in the laundry would have felt, but instead of trying to act these emotions I reflected on my own feelings of guilt and shame- the guilt of a daughter, a sister, a partner, a friend, a student. Very quickly this project became close to me, as I used these performances as a reflection of my guilt and shame that I feel need to become “cleansed”.