On journeys with my children we used to hold a pencil against a pad of paper with our eyes shut. Then we’d open our eyes and look at our ’train drawings’ then try and make out what they looked like.

In much the same way, artist Susan Morris presents her new series of large-scale prints: Untitled Motion Capture Drawings at London Gallery West. Susan’s art is much more sophisticated than ours, she strapped sensors to parts of her body to record her movements while doing a sequence of repetitive movements, but her desire to tap into unconscious creativity is the same.

Susan's works demonstrate what anthropologist Michael Taussig calls a ’bodily unconscious’. Like a play within a play, she recorded the process of making an artwork and from this produced another (subconscious) artwork.

“I’ve been trying to record the movements we make but don’t notice we’re making,“ says Susan. “All the habitual movements and gestures – I’m interested in where they come from.“

To create the works, Susan attached six reflectors onto her body – one on each hand and hip, one between her shoulders and one on the back of her head – and recorded their data using motion capture technology.

“The drawings I was working on were made using a plumb- line coated with chalk dust, which I was flicking against the paper. The marks were controlled and repetitive. After two full day sessions, I gathered all this data and converted it into a kind of script from algorithms. The effect is of these powdery thin scribbly lines that look as if they’ve been scratched into a surface.

“What’s interesting is that I know all this stuff’s gone on, all this theory and yet when people see it they don’t need to know any of this. To them it just looks like a piece of tangled hair or a waterfall. From this highly conceptual, abstract thing there’s something very human there.“

As an artist, Susan is primarily interested in automatic writing or drawing. She studied at Goldsmiths and Central Saint Martins and teaches part-time at the Westminster University and at The Royal College of Art.

In 2010, she was awarded a Wellcome Trust grant to make new work for the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford. Large tapestries woven directly from data tracking her sleep/wake patterns over a period of two years are on permanent display at the hospital.

“I wore a medical device that collated data from my pulse,“ explains Susan. “The information was then converted into coloured threads spooled onto a jacquard loom to create tapestries.

“Some people who saw the works said they looked like cityscapes or landscapes.“

Since the data for her latest works has been recorded in 3D, Susan is able to present them from numerous viewpoints.

“You could take any number of angles – a front view – what the paper saw, from above or a side view. There are seven large drawings in this show as well as details I’ve zoomed in on to reveal areas where there are more complex and enigmatic marks.

“Where my feet are it looks like there’s a heap of dust along the edge and some of the more twirly movements could have been made by my hands.“

To accompany the exhibition, Westminster University is hosting a Symposium titled Involuntary Drawing with guest speakers looking at the psychoanalytical significance of motion capture technology and its effects on art and authorship. Susan will be presenting her findings about her work on the day.

“While I was making the pieces, I sensed that, during the drawings’ evolution, my body became inhabited by something outside of the work. Something accompanied the drawing.

“Artists might turn to using recording devices as a form of displaced self-portraiture; one that writes itself and is geared to the world we don’t have control of.“

The exhibition is open until March 4, 9am to 5pm at London Gallery West, University of Westminster, Harrow Campus, Northwick Park, Watford Road, Harrow. Details: www.westminster.ac.ukl/london-gallery-west