Emma Bang

My works consider the notion that water can hold a memory. Water swirls through our bodies, as it flows through the River Thames. It slices the city in two, looming with secrets and guarding an archive of lost time and misplaced curiosities.

Ursula Le Guin suggested the first cultural invention was the container, not the weapon. A body can be seen as a container for water, as we each carry the sea, our origin, with us as our ancestors did before us. Once, we were living creatures embodied and bodied within the sea. Life gradually turned inwards, the sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within our bodies. 

Through an investigation of the surface as a permeable barrier, underwater sound recordings, and the imprint, I aim to investigate the poetics of water, recalling early childhood experiences of being introduced to the underwater world by my parents who prior to my birth were divers.