Suzi Morris

Suzi Morris was born in 1962 in Scotland and currently lives and works in London. Through her painting-based practice Morris examines the relationship between paint, colour and lived experience. Combining references to the body, perception, advanced medical science and late-modernist colour-field painting, Morris's vibrant gestural abstractions explore the visual possibilities of the contemporary sublime.       

To Morris, painting is a process of embodying the relationship between imagination and physicality, a process which she likens to the almost transcendental aspect of biotechnology and the genetic manipulation of microorganisms wherein the seemingly unimaginable is made real. Her paintings resonate with this spirit of scientific discovery whilst exploring the unpredictable inner landscape of self and body. 

'Self' is metamorphosed as 'I', a painted line which appears singularly or repeated, emerging in some works from dense networks of swirling brush strokes and in others manifesting among atmospheric clouds or hovering at the edge of inky dreamscapes. Painted in varying tones of cadmium red, deep cobalt blue and vibrant greens, these visions of the self emphasize an inward looking; a looking into the body where microscopic space expands and extends infinitely–beyond atoms, beyond neutrons, beyond protons–a reversal of perspective which inverts the outward-looking notion of the Nineteenth-Century colonial sublime.

Suzi Morris studied at the University of East London; Kingston University, London; and the City & Guilds of London Art School. Her work has been presented in numerous solo exhibitions, including Of Blooded Things, Imperial Festival, Imperial College London (2018); and The Viral Sublime, Herrick Gallery, London (2017).

She has been included in group exhibitions throughout the U.K. and in Europe, including Sensibilities of Belonging, with NoonPowell, Mall Galleries, London (2018); The Residency, Herrick Gallery, London (2017); From the Studio Floor, Cambridge Guildhall, Cambridge (2016); and Landscapes of Mind, Atelier-und Galleriehaus Defet, Nuremberg, Germany (2016).

Morris's work is represented in the collection of Imperial College, London, where she is currently the 2019 artist in residence.