Inlines: On Susan Morris's Silence (2021)

In July 2021, Susan Morris invited me to her home and studio in London to talk about her work and the text I am now writing. We drank tea and ate pastries while her cat, Teddy, hid under the sofa—the poor thing was unused to visitors because of the lockdown. After a brief catch up, Susan showed me a group of six tapestries woven on a Jacquard Loom in Belgium. The works were prototypes for a major commission from St John's College, Oxford, called Silence (On Prepared Loom), a group of six much larger tapestries that now hang on the walls of its new library, designed by the architectural firm Wright & Wright. The tapestries in Susan's studio were what she called ‘test pieces’1 for this work, but they are also parts of a work in its own right, named Silence (Project for a Library).