Emily Leach - residence time

An embroidered square is suspended asymmetrically in a translucent column of fabric.

The embroidery appears frozen in undulation.

The text reads: "to the bodies / of the drowned, the jettisoned / and those who walked into the water / suspended in residence time."

Detail of the verso side of the embroidery. The threads are haphazard. From this perspective, the text is illegible.

Residence time: the duration of persistence of a substance in an absorbed, suspended, or dissolved state.

“They said with wonder and admiration, you are still alive, like hydrogen, like oxygen.”
Dionne Brand, excerpt from Verso 55

“But even if those Africans who were in the holds, who left something of their prior selves in those rooms as a trace to be discovered, and who passed through the doors of no return did not survive the holding and the sea, they, like us, are alive in hydrogen, in oxygen; in carbon, in phosphorous, and iron; in sodium and chlorine. This is what we know about those Africans thrown, jumped, dumped overboard in Middle Passage; they are with us still, in the time of the wake, known as residence time.”
Christina Sharpe, excerpt from In the Wake: On Blackness and Being

Residence Time
Fabric, thread, embroidery hoops, salt.
2018 | 18" x 18" x 12'

Images: Ben Orozco