Susan Morris: Untitled Motion Capture Drawings

About

Susan Morris's Motion Capture drawings reveal the involuntary movements that occur alongside intended gestures or actions. They make visible a kind of bodily unconscious. Made at a motion capture studio where the artist produced a set of pre-planned, repetitive drawings whilst wearing sensors on various parts of her body. As one image unfolded by Morris's hand in the light of day, a second latent image accumulated as (numerical) data, to be processed by an inkjet printer into Untitled Motion Capture Drawings. The resulting cloud-like images — a web of thin white lines against a dense, black, powdery background — show all Morris's movements over a set timeframe. Large-scale works that show all the movement from all the reflectors worn during each recording session are exhibited alongside details that isolate the motion of a single sensor, whether attached to hand, knee or skull. The series aims to make the viewer aware of the complex, almost dance-like rhythm of bodily movement and habitual gesture that, even in the most mundane activities, possesses its own logic and leaves its own kind of trace. These drawings are therefore something between a creaturely scribble and a diagram bearing scientific data; a kind of notation or shadow of the source drawing from which it was generated. Curated by Professor Margaret Iversen, University of Essex.