In 2018 Sara Morawetz walked 2100 kilometres along the French meridian arc in homage to the 1792 journey of two French scientists measuring the Earth.
This is the story of "the way in which we came to the length that we know as the metre," Morawetz says.
Originally from Newcastle and now United States-based, Morawetz this week installed her first exhibition of material from that trip, along with her responses to it, as part of a residency at The Lock-Up gallery.
With GPS and laser technology, Morawetz determined the length of the metre as 110-millionth of a quadrant of Earth, the same definition method used in the 1700s.
Today, the metre is defined via the speed of light and the length of a second.
Morawetz's 108 field measurements were run through an algorithm written by her husband, Darren Engwirda, who is a scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
From the average of those calculations, Morawetz measured "a metre" as 1000.2 millimetres by decimal standards.
This indicates that systems of measurement are human, she says, "they just don't feel it".
"We think through them," Morawetz says. "Isn't that wonderful, and strange, and poetic?
"I try to truly live through it, to understand it and embody it."
In keeping with that philosophy, she once resided in a gallery in New York City for 37 days existing according to Martian time.
Days on Mars are 37 minutes longer than days on Earth.
All of Morawetz's work connects with the process of scientific discovery.
"Science is a philosophy and science is emotional, directed by impulse and decisions," she says.
"That's the humanity of it."
Morawetz takes measurement to the level of a medium of art, and a "conscious" part of her life.
When she moved to the United States in 2013, for Engwirda to take up a position with NASA, Morawetz got a tattoo on her ankle of two lines.
One is a centimetre length and the other an inch (the measurement system retained in the US).
It is one of several measurement-related tattoos she has.
Before the metric system, measurements were largely locally-understood systems, many based on the human body such as "a foot" - or, in France, the King's foot.
There were thousands of different measurement systems operating in France alone.
The change to metric was tied in with the French Revolution.
The field reports Morawetz wrote on her 112-day journey were sent to, and exhibited by, the Musee des Arts et Metiers in Paris, which is the museum linked with the original creation of the metre.
Those field notes are among the artefacts of Morawetz's experiment which are being shown in the Newcastle exhibition, titled Measure Twice, Cut Once.
Timber lengths equating to the measurements she took are also part of the installation, along with a black-and-white surveyor's target which was made unnecessarily large "for the theatre of it".
This is performance art, after all.
In the smaller cell rooms of the gallery, Morawetz will install works indicating ideas the project connects with.
During the first week of the exhibition, she will perform sessions making a large ball of string comprised of 8849 metres of thin twine, representing the height of Mount Everest.
Morawetz started winding the ball at her home in Santa Fe (much to the interest of her cat) and will finish it at her Newcastle show.
Everest is always growing, so "even the act of making this ball is inaccurate", she says.
Reflecting that, Morawetz has made drawings of the amount Mount Everest grows in a year, and how much height it has gained during her lifetime.
"It verges on banality," she says.
But, that simple action repeated "will eventually measure something out in both time and space".
As part of her artistic residency at The Lock-Up, which started a week ago in preparation for the exhibition's opening on Saturday, Morawetz also restaged an experiment in which she repeats the act of attempting to measure a metre by sight.
She is also screening a 2019 video work about "the farce of trying to measure one's self with one's body".
Measure Twice, Cut Once opens on Saturday, February 11, at 5.30pm and runs until March 26 at The Lock-Up.
Sara Morawetz will perform ball-winding on Sunday, February 12, from 11am to 1pm and February 15-17 from 10am to 12pm.
WHAT DO YOU THINK? Join the discussion in the comment section below.
Find out how to register or become a subscriber here.
