Walking between the interlinked studios of artist couple Annie Morris and Idris Khan is like treading the line between two worlds – lightly perfumed with garlic. Separated by a kitchen in which, on the day I visit, a couple of assistants are beavering away (one is sewing a large piece of fabric, the other is cooking up something heavenly for everyone’s lunch), they could not be more different.
Morris’s space, which looks out through big glass doors onto a quiet Stoke Newington street, is a literal forest of tall sculptures, towering stacks of rough-textured balls in different sizes, saturated with vivid pigments. There is miscellaneous art stuff on the coffee table in the corner, and a few bits of paper scattered around the edges of the floor – it is cheerful chaos, at least to the untrained eye.
Khan’s, on the other hand, out the back, is an oasis of straight lines; immaculate, gleaming floor with large, ordered canvases in muted colours on the walls (one is being worked on by another assistant, who is up a small scaffold painstakingly painting tiny Arabic calligraphy in razor-sharp horizontals) and a huge working table with not an object out of place. Talk about yin and yang.
It all feels very Couple Goals as we chat, perched on a paint-splattered sofa and armchairs in Morris’s studio. Sometimes they talk over each other, usually reiterating the same point in a slightly different way. But it’s the complementary nature of their very different art that makes their new exhibition, at Pitzhanger Manor in Ealing, so gorgeous. This is a new iteration, with some new larger scale works, of a show that first appeared in Petworth, at Newlands House, and their first duo show in London, where they mostly live and where their children, Maude and Jago, go to school.
“It’s a development of us showing together and it's sort of the right point, in terms of why we can,” says Khan. “Before I was making all black and white work and photography. The last three or four years I've been working more in colour, so it makes more sense.”
“The colour with Idris arrived during lockdown,” adds Morris, “because of seeing seasons changing.” The family decamped to West Sussex fairly quickly – they have since bought a home there, where they often spend the weekends – and “he started to think about the colours that you were seeing” (this happens a lot, them talking about and addressing each other in the same sentence) “and fed them into these watercolors that he made.”
Khan “always wanted a sort of an excuse to go into making more colour work, because Annie’s the big colourist, right, that's what you are. And so I almost needed a little angle to say, OK, this is why I'm making more colour work now. So looking at the seasons, having more time to look at them, that's how it developed. I often steal Annie's pigment now.”
The larger works are in Pitzhanger’s adjacent contemporary space, but the house, which was built by Sir John Soane as a family home and showcase for his architecture designs, and which was often visited by his best pal, the painter JMW Turner, will also house a few works, including in one of the bedrooms.
“Annie’s always stitched and drawn on pretty much everything, especially in our house,” says Khan, “on bedsheets, on pillow cases, on everything...”
“I love drawing,” shrugs Morris, with a logic that applies only to artists (one room of their other house in the Dordogne, which they’ve renovated over 10 years, is covered with her big, gestural sketches, and is, inevitably, beautiful).
“...and she made this big quilt a few years ago, it made sense for that to be on the bed in that bedroom where Turner had stayed,” continues Khan. “And then I have a piece called Every William Turner Postcard from Tate Britain, where I photographed all the postcards and layered them on top of each other. And that's also positioned next to the window where he would have probably have looked out onto the park.”
It would have been lovely to have one of Morris’s stack sculptures outdoors in what remains of Soane’s park – there are two up in Wakefield, one in the city centre and one at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, a legacy of a stunning show she staged there last year, focusing on this body of work. Though they are vibrant and seemingly full of joy, these precarious looking constructions were an act almost of defiance, born out of a time of utter devastation after, in their first year of marriage, Morris and Khan’s first child, a boy they called Finn, was stillborn.
The first of the series “were born out of absolute grief,” says Morris, “and it was just a very visceral answer to what we were going through. I didn’t even question making them, it was like, that’s what I have to make, because I want to remember this, and we’re not going to let this go.
“This particular incident was so major, and I felt that the texture of the paint made such sense, because it was the most fragile way of using paint, trying to keep that alive. Without that, I would never have made these particular works.” To really consolidate the pain, Khan’s mother, a nurse, died unexpectedly as the couple were reeling from the loss of their son.
Khan too found refuge in his work. “The way I dealt with it was to write down those feelings, turn them into stamps, turn them into words, and make the painting.” He much later created a sculpture, My Mother, from the huge stack of images of her that he had accumulated, a sort of pillar of memory.
I ask if artworks can almost act as a storage device for grief and pain. “I think that's exactly what I'm trying to do,” agrees Morris. “In every moment. Pain comes up when you least expect it, something that perhaps you haven't thought about in 20 years suddenly makes its way into your mind. For me, the best work comes from those moments that you remember. Work always breeds other work, so you keep moving through, I'm always circling around ideas, but I think that pain and grief are massive, almost a help to an artist.”
She mentions the performance artist Marina AbramoviÄ, whose show the couple have just seen at the Royal Academy. “She said, My God, what am I going to do now? I'm so happy all the time. But singing and happiness don't make for good work.”
Nobody needs a year like that though. “Yes it was really unbelievable. It was so shit,” says Morris. “We were in such a state. And also, I don't think it was expected, any of those things that happened were such surprises. So we were battling with the shock as well.”
That such beauty has come out of it is testament to both their artistic visions, but also perhaps the deep love and support that they offer each other. They are a tight unit; perhaps even more so due to the losses they’ve suffered, together and apart. Morris was a teenager when it was discovered that her father, a businessman who was away a lot, had another secret family. “It was a real shock,” she says. That experience feeds into some of her more figurative work, “these drawings that come out of some of the the memories I have.”
For Khan, some of the processes and motifs that characterise his work come, he thinks, from childhood. His father is a doctor from Pakistan, “I was very much taught the ways of Islam, read the Qu’ran, went to the mosque, it’s part of who I was, as a kid. So it's inherent, really, that kind of thought process, especially in terms of repetition, and the way one reads the Quran and returning to a prayer mat five times a day. I find a beauty in the repetition.
“I tend to think that I have a sort of hold on that world. Meaning I can dip into it occasionally, and I understand it, as much as I can. And I think it's nice to reference it.” He spent summers in Pakistan as a boy, “because my father always wanted to go back to see his mother. I learnt to play cricket on the street. But I remember it changed, I remember it being safe, and then suddenly unsafe to play cricket on the street.”
The couple met through friends in New York in 2007, at the opening preview of a friend’s exhibition. “I remember walking in and... I’m not going to say love at first sight but I mean, definitely...” Khan trails off, blushing slightly.
“We actually got engaged about three months later,” says Morris. “So crazy. We moved in together ridiculously quickly. Then we got married a year later.” Their studios have always been close. “We see each other during the day, but it's pretty good. I'm always in my studio, you’re always in yours,” says Morris.
“And we definitely help each other out with work,” adds Khan, who Morris says is “amazing at hanging exhibitions”. “And I will say that, you know, it's so great to be in it together, growing as an artist, and as you get more opportunities,” Khan says. “I'm so lucky to have someone to discuss that with, making the right decisions or the wrong decisions. And now, showing together. It's really nice.”
“We’ve always been very present with the kids” he adds. “We decided that we're going to be those kind of parents, so I like picking them up from school, you know, even though they say I never do it. I’m like, I pick you up every single day! But when the kids came, it was very much about how much time you have in the studio.”
They are strict with their time. “I never can sit down for a meeting, because I know that in that time, I could do four drawings that might turn into an artwork,” says Morris. “I really have that in my mind. And you always say that, if you don’t take those moments, they're just gone. When the kids were little, we would literally take them [everywhere]. I remember Idris had a show in Berlin and we put Maude in a cardboard box while he was installing something, and we’d just push her around and she's never been happier.”
Perhaps in an indication of how happy things don’t make good art, “they say all the time, ‘you only ever talk about Finn’,” laughs Morris. “‘We never get talked about in anything’. It’s so funny.”
Are they showing signs of following in their parents’ footsteps? “I don’t know whether they're gonna be artistic or not,” says Khan. “Maude is interested, for sure,” says Morris. “She really has a distinctive, quite Japanese sort of drawing style. Jago not particularly; his line is awesome, and he can draw, but he doesn't really want to sit down and draw with you.” “Not yet,” says Khan.
Maybe get him a camera?
“Exactly that. I think he can do anything.”
