CLAIRE WATSON
VISUAL ARTIST
IT COULD GO EITHER WAY, 2020. Pattern parts of leather coat, wood veneer, canvas, thread, gesso; 42 x 36 inches
Claire Watson’s practice, informed by her personal history and her research, is grounded in the transformation of found objects through handwork and craft. For a recent series titled Reanimations, Watson deconstructs thrift-store leather clothing, preserving the pattern parts as found shapes. She uses tailoring techniques to reassemble the leather shapes with canvas and other media in the visual language of painting, translating the raw physicality of the material into unlikely and energetic new forms.
My subject matter is located in the irrevocable actions that create a cycle of waste, with violence at its source. My own interventions entail further acts of destruction as I render the objects useless, in terms of their original intended function. Even when disassembled and reduced to their material essence these artifacts evoke, for me, both the persistent presence of personality, and a palpable sense of loss.
It’s the mystery of this simultaneous presence and absence that underlies my response to these particular materials and their renewal. Part of my project is to discover how and whether it is possible to separate the formal, abstract compositions from the matter so loaded with associations. Their substance is resistant to transformation from the very beginning and it is always exciting to work against this kind of resistance, to allow the process and the intrinsic qualities of a material to be the only narrative, to make concrete the thing that I imagine, and that can’t find expression in language.
