About the work

Susan Morris engages with periodicity and the involuntary mark, either through a diaristic form of writing incorporating multiple voices such as overheard conversations or material gleaned from the news, or by diagrammatic works generated from recordings of her sleep/wake patterns, or of ambient light or sound.

‘Mornings…’ (2024), is a typing. Through the use of carbon copy paper, the writing has been transferred from one surface to another with the original or top copy discarded. This displacement is typical of the operation at play in many of Morris’s works, where one absent thing, rule or action is used to generate another which nevertheless retains an echo of the original missing thing. The poem references many well-known verb lists such as those by Richard Serra, Bernadette Mayer and Etel Adnan – the latter most importantly when using this form to express helplessness in the face of political unrest, including war and genocide.

Date and country of birth

1962, GB

Career Highlights

Morris has exhibited internationally, most recently in Energie / Energy: Works from the Schroth Collection, SKK, Germany (2024). She has won several permanent commissions, including Silence (On Prepared Loom), a set of six large Jacquard tapestries based on sound recordings for the library at St John’s College, University of Oxford, with accompanying artist’s book (2022).

Her work has been collected by the ERES-Stiftung, Germany, FRAC Alsace, France, Pasquart Stiftung Kunsthaus-Sammlung, Switzerland, Sammlung Schroth/SKK, Germany, and the UBS Art Collection, Switzerland.

Forthcoming exhibitions include The Rule: Forming Lives, Medieval and Modern, at Sainsbury’s Centre for Visual Arts, UEA, Norwich, UK.