Stack 9, Copper Blue

Towering more than two metres tall, Annie Morris’ Stack 9, Copper Blue (2018) is a vivid example of the artist’s most acclaimed series. Orbs of varying scale, rendered in richly pigmented plaster, balance—seemingly impossibly—atop one another. Morris’ wider oeuvre spans myriad media from drawing to textiles, and for the artist the Stacks occupy a space between sculpture and painting: ‘really, for me, they are just paintings, a sort of three-dimensional sculptural painting’ (A. Morris quoted in D. Trigg, ‘Annie Morris—interview' in Studio International, 28 September 2021). The hand of the artist is integral to these works, and each Stack begins with a drawing on paper before being later translated, intuitively, into pigment and sand on plaster. The tactile, hovering presence of Stack 9, Copper Blue evokes both strength and fragility, a tension maintained through the work’s totemic structure.

Morris’ Stack series represents a highly personal pictorial language. The first Stacks emerged in 2014 from a period of intense grief following the stillbirth of Morris’ first child with her husband, the artist Idris Kahn. In their striking compositional structure, they speak to the precarity of life, and the tenuous line between joy and grief which underlies all human experience. Yet Morris’ Stacks are resilient, even hopeful in their articulation of precarity. Buoyant tones of ultramarine, viridian and ochre imbue the present work with a rich glow of optimism. ‘Everybody experiences tragedy at some point in their life and for me these Stack pieces are all about what happens afterwards,’ says Morris; ‘they have a hopeful quality to them I think, that’s what I want them to have’ (A. Morris quoted in ibid.). Morris’s first museum exhibition was held in 2021 at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park’s Weston Gallery. In 2023, she was commissioned by the Hepworth Wakefield to create a monumental bronze Stack as a permanent installation for the West Yorkshire History Centre.