Susan Morris Motion Capture Drawing [SPDR]: View From Side, 2012 Archival inkjet on Hahnemühle paper 150 x 250 cm 59 1/8 x 98 1/2 inches Bartha_contemporary
Bartha Contemporary presents Concordance (2005–2025), an ambitious twenty-year investigation by London-based artist Susan Morris that uncovers cyclical patterns, received clichés, and inadvertent lyricism embedded within daily print journalism.
Following its inclusion in the Sainsbury Centre exhibition Living by the Rule: Contemporary Meets Medieval, this expansive undertaking is issued in two signed and numbered artists' book configurations.
Working at half-decade intervals across two decades, Morris examined print copies of The Guardian issued on the statistically designated happiest and gloomiest days of each year, dates arrived at through a widespread yet dubious psychological formula.
Employing custom software, she isolated every full infinitive together with its succeeding three words.
When sorted alphabetically and divorced from their journalistic frameworks, these reordered fragments juxtapose disparate statements, converting standard media chatter into an estranged, poetic inventory.
While concordances traditionally serve as indices for textual comparison, Morris reconfigures the tool to register linguistic habits that typically pass unnoticed, prompting reflection on how ambient prose constructs collective identities, defines shared boundaries, and marks the excluded.
In an accompanying essay, art historian Margaret Iversen frames Morris’s methodology as an automatic, detached mode of observation, situating it within an intellectual tradition stretching from Gustave Flaubert’s satire of received ideas to present-day inquiries regarding algorithmic and synthetic text generation.
Formulated long before generative writing tools became ubiquitous, Morris’s piece anchors these concerns within physical materiality and historical passage.
Susan Morris Sun Dial: NightWatch, Activity and Light (Tilburg Version), 2010–2012 Jacquard tapestry: silk and linen Edition 2/3 155 x 589 cm 61 1/8 x 232 inches Bartha_contemporary
The arrangement deliberately operates visually as well as linguistically: asymmetrical phrase lengths yield irregular surface tempos, while typographic white spaces drift vertically through the pages like compositional rivers.
By focusing on these typographical interruptions, Morris balances print syntax against abstract picture-making, allowing isolated fragments to spark involuntary humor, poignancy, and accidental verse.
Concurrently, the two-decade timeline records the shifting parameters of print media itself, exposing the physical downsizing and thinning text counts that chart the retreat of paper newspapers before digital platforms.
Published by Book Works in London, the project is offered as a rare Portfolio Edition of ten signed, numbered copies alongside an introductory Folio Edition limited to seventy-five examples.
This textual interrogation extends Morris’s overarching interdisciplinary practice, which harnesses tracking hardware, biometric measurements, and subconscious movement to construct analytical Jacquard tapestries, chalk diagrams, and inkjet prints.
After completing initial training at Birmingham College of Art and receiving her Master’s degree from Goldsmiths College, Morris earned a doctorate from the University of the Arts London in 2007 with a thesis examining psychoanalytic theory, photography, and recollection.
Her early drawing practice, exemplified by her 2009 plumb line works in vine ash and chalk, enforced constrained procedural rules that inadvertently uncovered erratic errors and unplanned physical gestures beyond conscious direction.
Collaborating with motion capture specialist David Green at Newcastle University, she converted tracked bodily gestures into banded vertical geometries, interrogating personal agency and physiological identity against rigid chronological measures.
Morris subsequently broadened this tracking methodology to automated sensors like the Actiwatch, which documented ambient illumination levels alongside bodily kinetics over months to direct yarn selections and color values for woven projects such as Sundial: Nightwatch, Activity and Light.
These data-driven tapestries capture a somatic subconscious operating beneath intentional daily routine. In high-contrast monochromatic inkjet drawings, such as her 2012 side-perspective works, the artist applies solely black ink to unprinted surfaces, generating negative white slivers that resemble delicate clusters of hair adrift within dense dark fields.
Commissioned by St. John’s College, Oxford, for her 2020 Silence series, she mapped field recordings collected outside an academic library onto graph-like grids across cyanotype blue tapestries, transposing ambient decibel variations into woven tonal shifts.
Complementing these sculptural textiles, Morris’s long-term book works, including the multi-volume Diary Project, assimilate day-to-day ephemera—receipts, travel stubs, overheard speech, and media fragments—into sustained self-examinations.
Her work has been shown widely through solo exhibitions at institutions such as CentrePasquArt in Biel and Art Exchange at the University of Essex, as well as institutional and gallery group presentations across London, Cologne, and Zürich.
Susan Morris Plumb Line Drawing, Degree Zero, 2010 Vine ash on paper © the artist. Courtesy Bartha Contemporary Ltd. Bartha_contemporary
