In The Studio With Annie Morris

Between multiple shows across three continents—not to mention a home renovation—the British artist has a lot to do.

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ANNIE MORRIS is talking a mile a minute over Zoom, routinely interrupting herself midsentence, or even mid-word, as she paces non-stop 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”.

Morris is probably well served by her inability to sit still. When we speak, she’s preparing for multiple shows, among them a solo outing opening 2 November at Timothy Taylor gallery in New York, another at Fosun Museum in Shanghai next spring, and a Khan-Morris two-person exhibition that travelled from Newlands House in Petworth to Pitzhanger Manor & Gallery in London, where it would be on view through 7 January. Meanwhile, the couple are in the final stages of renovating a new home for themselves and their two young children—the former residence of Oscar Wilde’s lover Lord Alfred Douglas as well as of the artist William Rothenstein.