Claire Watson

Lives and works in Water Mill, NY, USA

Artist statement

This body of work draws on a material vocabulary of leather, canvas, thread, and gesso. It begins with a collection of leather clothing, salvaged from thrift stores or handed down by family, friends, and fellow artists. I take each garment apart along its seam lines and use methods of domestic sewing and self-taught tailoring to embed the pattern pieces in canvas grounds, in new configurations. Machine-stitched seams in the canvas become elements of drawing; hand stitches punctuate the passing of time. Gesso is applied to areas of the front and to the reverse of the canvases after they are stretched. I am building images, but the works are conceived and constructed as objects, and remain as tactile as they are visual. At each stage in my process, I confront a different layer of the material’s history. I first encounter the abandoned fashion item. Whether well used and faintly scented with perfume, or stiff, cheap, and quickly discarded, it retains impressions of its former owner. Dismantling the garment makes me look underneath, to consider the daily lives and aspirations of the anonymous factory laborers who produced it. I am struck by the disjuncture between our culture’s rapid cycles of consumption and waste, and the value and meaningfulness of hand labor. I think often about the care associated with traditional sewing skills—and about my own use of those skills to take apart rather than to mend. At its base, the physical properties of the leather hide—its wrinkles,...

Artwork