SUSAN MORRIS

A set of six Jacquard tapestries woven directly from a recording of ambient sound, taken in the garden outside a library. The sound recording is configured to the ‘score’ for John Cage’s 1952 Lecture on Nothing, a spoken word performance that has silence at its core. The most striking feature of the work is a gradient colour that travels from left to right, beginning with a dark, inky, blue and ending with a cloudy white. The choice of the colour blue, and the way this colour passes across the set of six tapestries like a shadow, is intended to evoke the Cyanotype - proto-photographic prints made with sunlight. Stretching the tapestries emphasises the net-like structure of crossing lines that make up both the rhythmic pattern of the sound recording and the gradient colour effect, which is achieved by weaving solid lines of colour either closer or further away from one another. Another gradient is applied to the sound recording itself, with the two gradients (background and foreground) producing a horizontal movement that the eye registers as traveling in both directions. Finally, the sound peaks, which fall like rain down the tapestries, produce a a vertical movement in the opposite direction. These works are related to a series of large-scale Jacquard tapestries that have recently been commissioned by St John’s College, University of Oxford, for permanent display in their new library and study centre.