SunDial:NightWatch Activity and Light 2010-2012 (Satin Weave), 2017 by Susan Morris

SunDial:NightWatch_Activity and Light 2010-2012 (Satin Weave), 2017, is an extremely accurate record of three years of the artist’s sleep/wake patterns, with each minute of each of the 1,096 recorded days represented by a single weft thread. Continuing Morris’s long-standing engagement with the way digital recordings of bodily rhythms can be translated into a kind of displaced self-portrait – or cast shadow of the ‘self’. The tapestries were woven directly out of data recorded on an Actiwatch, a scientific-medical device used to track disturbances in sleep that Morris has used in her work since 2005. Worn on the wrist, the Actiwatch preceded the now ubiquitous self-tracking devices, such as Fitbits and Apple watches, and initially could only record three weeks’ worth of data at a time. Despite this limitation, Morris persisted, eventually making continuous recordings of up to five years to produce a large body of work collectively titled SunDial:Night Watch. All of Morris’s tapestries are woven on a Jacquard loom, which operates – like the computer of which it was the precursor – on a binary system. Thus, the recorded data is translated directly into coloured thread and into a textile that maps lived experience across clock and calendrical time. The resulting tapestries function as material records of the body in time, where the logic of measurement meets the organic fluctuations of daily life. Photo: © 2025 Angus Mill