Bio
Claire Watson received a BFA from the University of Texas at Austin, and an MFA from Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Rome and Philadelphia.  Her work has been shown in New York at Art Sites in Riverhead: Islip Art Museum; the Anthony Giordano Gallery at Dowling College, Oakdale;  Art in General, NYC; and the Lehman College Art Gallery in the Bronx. It has also been exhibited at Baxter Gallery, Maine College of Art in Portland; the Steven Wirtz Gallery in San Francisco; and at Johnson Gallery, Middlebury College, Vermont.  She received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 1990-1991, and is a 2007 Fellow in Sculpture from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Artist's Statement
Ceci N'est Pas Une Pipe (1991-1995)
Between 1991 and 1995 I constructed a series of twenty or so small, wall-mounted sculptures from a collection of tobacco pipes.  The first piece took as its starting point the paradox of Magritte's painting, La Trahison des images. The titles were in ungoverned French, a language in which I was once fluent enough to dream, but in which I am now barely conversant.  Tobacco pipes and my forgotten French fascinated me as anachronisms in the worlds of objects and langage.  I was concerned with the interdependence of image and language, "figures of speech," with contradicting the tobacco pipe's epitome of functional form, and non-sense.

With Kid Gloves (2001-2007)
This series was created from a collection of ladies gloves.  The gloves suggest to me the body (its fragility); preoccupations with revealing or containing it; and escape through role-playing and costume. They are altered, hand-sewn, fitted with skeletal wire armatures, and stuffed with sawdust to become discrete objects. Some incorporate doll parts or doll making techniques.  In un-making them, I think of women's traditions of handwork, particularly in long hours of sewing, but they are also reminiscent of doll-things or toys.

Familiars (2008)
In this series, I've combined wooden kitchen implements and sewing tools with a translucent "flesh-colored" doll maker's clay.  I'm interested in manifestations of the human form in everyday objects that are designed to be grasped or touched.  The objects are given clay features that are modeled and then scarred or partially erased.  They have been aged, but they have also been diverted from their forgotten intended necessity to the more sensual realm of play.  Part tools, part playthings of domesticity, they are the familiars and the relics of a scarcely remembered feminine past.

Language and art are tools, and playthings.  I make objects to see what they will look like, but mainly to give form to ideas that can't be put to words, and names to images that arrive in the imagination wholly unexpectedly.


See c.v.

Links:

http://www.afonline.artistsspace.org

http://www.nyfa.org

http://www.wooloo.org/clairewatson

http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk