Susan Morris

"The SunDial:NightWatch" series began in 2010 and consists of large Jacquard tapestries derived from Actiwatch recordings of Susan Morris’s fluctuating sleep/wake patterns and exposure to light; many of these recordings are taken over long time periods of up to five years. In this series, the Jacquard loom becomes a device for making automatic drawings, with each minute directly translated into coloured thread. In this instance, "Diptych: Binary Tapestry (and Reversal)" records the artist's activity over a five-year period, beginning at the bottom left of the tapestry on January 1, 2010, at zero hundred hours and ending at the top right at midnight on December 31, 2014. In this work, the artist used equally thin warp and weft threads to draw attention to the binary character of the Jacquard weaving process and that of the work itself. The tapestries look surprisingly like something in the natural world: for example, the low levels of activity recorded at night, which occupy the bottom third of the tapestry, resemble a night sky or a dark river or canyon in the middle of a landscape. "Diptych: Binary Tapestry (and Reversal)" has been exhibited and published widely. A version of the work is part of the Collection of the Foundation of Conceptual Art SKK Soest, Germany.