Annie Morris is talking a mile a minute over Zoom, routinely interrupting herself mid-sentence, or even mid-word, as she paces nonstop through her East London studio. “I never sit down,” she admits, holding her phone aloft.
Her husband, artist Idris Khan, whose studio occupies the same former toy-factory building as hers, pops into the screen and vouches for her ambulatory habit. “People follow her around the studio,” he says.
That space is now a forest of richly hued plaster sculptures, the latest in Morris’s long-running series of totemic towers of misshapen spheres she calls “Stacks.” The orbs appear to teeter on top of one another in ways that defy physics (a hidden steel pole impaling the pieces enables that bit of magic). “It’s a really, really busy studio—I can barely walk around,” she says. “And I have to clear some space, because I’m going to be doing some drawings.” Somehow, though, she finds the workshop has “a nice calm to it.”
