The Arts Center at Duck Creek is pleased to announce Claire Watson: Re-figuring, open to the public on September 4, and on view through October 10, 2021. A reception for the artist will be held on September 18, from 5-7pm. Gallery hours are Thursday - Sunday, 2 - 6pm and by appointment.

The word play title Re-figuring could not be a better fit for Claire Watson’s show at Duck Creek. The used leather clothing Watson manipulates not only functions as an intriguingly tactile surface, but also has a hand in the work’s composition and content. What was once a pair of leather pants becomes an abstracted, deconstructed map of the human body, the elegant glyph-like forms bound on all sides by a finely stitched seam. The harmony in these arrangements feel deeply connected to harmony in our human form, an elegant reconstruction of our Golden ratio.

“As a sculptor, I work with found, commonplace objects, deploying various methods of building in response to the physical nature of the materials. For the past several years my practice has been based on salvaging and disassembling leather clothing, to preserve their pattern pieces as found shapes. In recent work, I recombine the pattern pieces into new visual forms using inherited domestic arts of hand and machine sewing, and self- taught tailoring techniques. Being made of skin, the objects function for me as memento mori of sorts. Their substance is tactile, and visceral, projecting something of the animus of former lives both animal and human. In the works presented at Duck Creek, pattern parts of leather coats and pants are reconfigured as appliquéd or seamed inset panels in canvas. The leather contains forgotten histories, while the repetitive stitch marks record the passage of time.“ - Claire Watson, 2021

Claire Watson is a visual artist who lives and works in Water Mill, NY. Born in Amarillo, TX, she earned a BFA from the University of Texas at Austin, and an MFA at Tyler School of Art in Rome and Philadelphia. Her awards include an Artist Residency at The Watermill Center and a Residency Fellowship at the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. She is the recipient of a Fellowship in Sculpture from New York Foundation for the Arts, and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. Claire has exhibited at The Heckscher Museum of Art; Southampton Arts Center; Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum, San Antonio, TX; Paul Robeson Galleries at Rutgers, Newark; and Art in General, NYC, among other venues. Her art is included in the permanent collections of The Heckscher Museum of Art and The Watermill Center, and in numerous private collections.

For more information about this artist, please visit www.clairewatson.net