Susan Morris: Concordance

Bartha_contemporary presents Concordance (2005–2025), a twenty-year project by Susan Morris that explores repetition, received ideas, and unexpected poetry in the language of the daily newspaper. Recently exhibited at the Sainsbury Centre in Living by the Rule: Contemporary Meets Medieval, the work is now available in two signed and numbered editions.

At five-year intervals, beginning in 2005 and ending 20 years later, Morris selected two print editions of The Guardian: those published on the supposedly ‘happiest’ and ‘unhappiest’ days of the year, as predicted by a widely circulated but spurious formula. Using computer software, she extracted all the full infinitives (verbs preceded by ‘to’) and the three follow-on words. These fragments were then arranged alphabetically, separating them from their original articles and placing otherwise unrelated statements alongside one another.

A concordance traditionally offers a way to locate and compare words within a text. In Morris’s hands, it becomes a way to attend to language that ordinarily goes unnoticed. Where other works by the artist record ambient light, sound or habitual bodily movement, Concordance registers the media chatter surrounding everyday life. Its repeated formulations invite questions about how the language we encounter shapes our perceptions, establishes a sense of who ‘we’ are and positions others outside that collective.

In her essay Camera Consciousness, reproduced in the book, Margaret Iversen considers this process through the idea of an automatic, estranged form of observation. She connects Morris’s enquiry to a history of questioning received language, from Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas to contemporary concerns about the standardisation of writing through artificial intelligence. Begun long before the widespread adoption of AI chatbots,Concordance (2005–2025) gives these concerns a sustained material and historical context.

Yet the work also asks to be looked at. Phrases of varying lengths create irregular patterns, while spaces between words form typographical ‘rivers’ through the text. Morris deliberately attends to these gaps, allowing the arrangement to move between writing and pictorial abstraction. Removed from the continuity of reportage, the fragments produce accidental associations and brief passages of involuntary poetry. Familiar language becomes uncertain, sometimes poignant, sometimes absurd.

Over its twenty-year span, the project also registers changes in the newspaper itself. The work makes visible the shrinking physical format and declining word count of The Guardian, tracing the contraction of print journalism as online news proliferates.

The Artist's BookConcordance (2005–2025) is offered as a Portfolio Edition produced by Book Works, London, limited to 10 (+ 1AP) signed and numbered copies at £900 each. A soft-bound Folio Edition, limited to 75 signed and numbered copies, is available at an introductory price of £180 each.