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.

Morris’s piece for the Drawing Room Biennial 2024 adopts Robert Rauschenberg’s method of ‘transfer drawing’ – a technique that enabled him to take images from print media and transfer them directly onto paper or canvas, creating new combinations that suggest alternative political histories. Morris’s choice of image is a fragment of a photograph of a whiteboard that surfaced in the British press in May 2021. The diagram on the whiteboard documented the UK government’s plans for keeping the country safe during the then-ongoing global pandemic. The original image was not intended to be seen by members of the public.

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.