Silence (On Prepared Loom)

In the summer of 2019 I was invited by Vivien Lovell of Modus Operandi Art Consultants to submit a proposal to make new work for the recently completed Library and Study Centre at St John’s College, University of Oxford. By the autumn, the project was proceeding smoothly. I had decided to work with sound and had made a number of recordings in the garden outside the library. With the help of my long-term collaborator Paulo Ricca, I had converted the data into a visual form that evoked the (imaginary) score for John Cage’s ‘Lecture on Nothing’ – the logic of this is explained in ‘Inlines’, an essay by Rye Dag Holmboe.*

In the garden outside the library at St John’s College, Susan installed an audio recorder that registered whatever sounds were produced by the surrounding environment over a period of 50 minutes. Airplanes flying overhead, birdsong, a voice, the rustle of leaves, the distant sound of traffic. These are the sorts of sounds we often neglect to listen to but almost always hear, especially those of us who live in cities; noise pollution or signs of life, depending on your temperament. Susan made a number of these recordings. The one she chose was made during term time; precisely, at 13:40 on Tuesday 12 November, 2019. The recording was passed through a computer where a specially written algorithm translated the sounds into visual form, organising them according to how loud they were, as well as their amplitude and duration. This pattern was colour coded and sent to a Jacquard loom in Belgium, where it was woven into tapestries.

-Rye Dag Holmboe

Silence (On Prepared Loom), 2021. Panel no. 1 of 6, Jacquard tapestry, cotton, silk & polyester yarn, 210 x 290 cm. Photo© Stephen White & Co.

I had also visited my weaver Marcos Ludueña-Segre in Ghent, Belgium, where the Jacquard looms I had worked with for the previous ten years are located.

Then rumours started of the dangers to human life of a new virus first detected in China. This threat seemed a long way away, but of course by February 2020 the Coronovirus was very close indeed. On March 12th 2020, I gave the final presentation to the selection panel in Oxford. The following week, England locked down. Re-reading our correspondence during that time, I see how filled with fear and confusion it is, as we seemed to stumble through the days. At one point I suggested to my weaver that we communicate using this thing called Zoom that someone had told me about. Marcos hadn’t heard of it, but funnily enough his wife had recently mentioned it. ‘I’ll look into it’, he wrote. Within weeks everything was done on this platform: family birthdays, his daughter’s schooling, our work. And so we continued. But then the factory closed, the looms went silent. ‘We are walking around the empty streets of Ghent’, wrote Marcos, and I told him we were doing the same in London.

Somehow, we completed the project. The tapestries arrived at the framers for stretching in October 2020. The stretching took some time; it was tricky because the person who does this was shielding, away from London. We couldn’t install the work until August 2021; sorting the lighting and getting a photographer into the building took a further eleven months.

Silence (On Prepared Loom), 2021. Panel no. 3 of 6, Jacquard tapestry, cotton, silk & polyester yarn, 210 x 290 cm. Photo© Stephen White & Co.

A word about the way my work engages with that of John Cage. His ‘Lecture on Nothing’ provided me with a way to structure the divisions across each of the six tapestries that make up Silence… However, I have also playfully interpreted the relation between a loom and a piano – the loom is in fact very like a musical instrument – with the suggestion that I have ‘prepared’ it to correspond with the way that Cage famously prepared his piano. Of course, I could not insert screws or any other such objects into the machinery as Cage did, an action that would destroy it in seconds (although this sort of thing would be possible with hand weaving). Instead, I sent the loom a set of specific instructions – data – to produce an outcome I could not entirely control or predict but which nevertheless remains true to its source: the recording of ambient sound taken in the garden outside the library. I thank Alex Bacon for his essay ‘Resistant Data’, which so generously unpicks my interest in disrupting systems.*

Rather than using a rigorous scientific approach – that of a botanist, say – Morris subverted the supposedly objective parameters of most data collection, turning instead to the model of the musical score. She activated her recording equipment at somewhat arbitrary times and allowed the vagaries of what was captured to determine the work’s final form, without any predetermined plans or attempts to control or analyse the situation in advance. This makes her approach determinately Cagean in its desire to allow chance operations to shape the work’s form, and also to ensure that the tapestries reflect only a discrete and highly limited set of possibilities of a system with potentially endless permutations. This relates to how every performance of one of John Cage’s scores represents a singular set of possibilities, typically ones determined by their occurrence within a set duration that limits them.

-Alex Bacon

Silence (On Prepared Loom), 2021. Panel no. 6 of 6, Jacquard tapestry, cotton, silk & polyester yarn, 210 x 290 cm. Photo© Stephen White & Co.

Visiting the library in 2022, the work seemed altered, but what had actually changed was my relationship to the space – my knowledge and experience of the library and the gardens. It was a brand-new building, but even as the bookshelves were being filled the rooms were emptying of students.

Now the students are back, the dust has settled, the building is breathing. It’s full of life.

The above was first published in the artist’s book Silence (On Prepared Loom), Bartha Contemporary, 2022, to accompany Morris’s set of six large Jacquard tapestries, permanently installed at The Library and Study Centre, St John’s College, University of Oxford, 2021. The book, which has its own shelf mark in the library, includes *essays by Simon Aeberhard, Alex Bacon, and Rye Dag Holmboe, and can be read in full here.

Susan Morris is an artist who also writes. Her work engages with periodicity and the involuntary mark, either through a diaristic form of writing or through diagrammatic drawings made by applying specific rules or limited actions. She has made Jacquard tapestries generated from data recorded by devices worn on her body and, more recently, from ambient light and sound recordings. She has published a 12-part artist’s book, de Umbris Idæarum [on the Shadow Cast by our Thoughts], 2021, that combines fragmentary written notations alongside the visual material gleaned alongside. Her PhD, On the Blank, UAL, 2007, examines the relation between writing, photography and drawing. Morris is currently working on her second large-scale written piece, an ‘involuntary novel’ made using the app Evernote—this as counterpoint to her visual work that has been described as ‘involuntary drawing’. Ten years apart, both text-based works record day-to-day life over the course of a single year.

She is co-editor, with Rye Dag Holmboe, of the book On Boredom: Essays in Art and Writing, UCL Press, 2021, and contributor to Lifework: On the Autobiographical Impulse in Contemporary Art, Writing, and Theory, edited by Dr Moran Sheleg, Manchester University Press, 2024. She has won several grants and awards. Her work is in the collections of the ERES-Stiftung, Germany; FRAC Alsace, France; Pasquart Stiftung Kunsthaus-Sammlung, Switzerland; Sammlung Schroth/SKK, Germany, and the UBS Art Collection, Switzerland; and in private collections.

Morris has exhibited internationally, with a large group show, The Rule: Forming Lives, Medieval and Modern, forthcoming at Sainsbury’s Centre for Visual Arts, UEA, Norwich, UK, 2026. Her most recent solo exhibition was Four Tapestries at Bartha Contemporary, London, in 2025. She lives and works in London, UK.