Claire Watson: Re-Paired

Claire Watson received Top Honors in the 84th Artist Members Exhibition, selected by Virginia Lebermann, cofounder and board president of Ballroom Marfa. This exhibition marks Watson’s first major institutional solo presentation on the East End of Long Island, where she has maintained a home and studio in Water Mill for more than thirty years. Re-Paired brings together more than fifteen works of sculpture and mixed-media assemblage created between 2012 and the present, reflecting a sustained engagement with material, memory, and the body.

Watson initially studied painting but found herself making objects to paint, leading her to shift toward sculpture. Her early work consistently referenced the human figure; she has long incorporated found objects and developed her work in series. Her use of tobacco pipes became a recurring motif after she encountered a trove of them at a flea market; her interest was shaped in part by her father and grandfather, both pipe smokers. Her investigation of the pipe was also informed by art historical references, including Le Corbusier’s writing on the briar pipe as an example of ideal functional form in Towards a New Architecture (1923), and René Magritte’s canvas The Treachery of Images (1929), with its paradoxical declaration, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (This is not a pipe), painted below a realistic image of a pipe. Watson explored the pipe’s symbolic and formal potential throughout the 1990s.

After a hiatus of nearly a decade while she was working and raising her sons—during which she maintained a dedicated sketchbook practice—Watson returned to making in the early 2000s with renewed focus. A formative moment occurred when a viewer expressed surprise that a woman would work with tobacco pipes. This comment prompted Watson to consider the gendered associations of objects: If the pipe carried masculine connotations, what might constitute its feminine counterpart? Drawing on her personal history and childhood memories of visiting the glove counter with her mother, she identified the glove as the ultimate feminine utilitarian object.

Beginning in 2012 and 2013, Watson started combining tobacco pipes with leather gloves. Revisiting her sketchbooks, she recognized that she had drawn hands and pipes for years before incorporating them into her sculptural work. In pieces such as Sideways, Have I Forgotten Something?, and L’apéritif (all 2012), the glove envelops or “swallows” the pipe, creating hybrid forms that are both intimate and surreal. In 2017, following the loss of her father, she began collecting children’s chairs. One example, Poutish (2020), incorporates what was advertised as a vintage “time-out” chair. Drawn to the histories embedded in found objects, Watson transforms these chairs with repurposed leather, creating works that balance tenderness and severity.

As she deconstructed gloves, Watson became increasingly attentive to the unexpected shapes that emerged, as in Ancestors Say (2014–17), composed of twenty pairs of gloves, ten white and ten black. At this point she established a guiding rule: to preserve the original geometry of each object and allow its structure to generate new forms.

This approach expanded into her current body of work. Using salvaged leather garments—jackets, coats, pants, and gloves—Watson deconstructs and reconfigures them through traditional sewing and patternmaking techniques. She retains key elements of garment construction, including curved seams, darts, and panels, allowing the absent body to remain present. Rather than significantly altering the material, she intervenes subtly, as in the series that includes Petite Non Plus (2020), adding false buttonholes or pocket slashes that suggest a visage or bodily trace. These gestures introduce elements of surrealism while maintaining a grounding in geometric abstraction.

Spanning fourteen years, the works in Re-Paired reflect a shift in scale, with Watson’s most recent pieces expanding her investigation of form and structure. Traces of wear—creases, discoloration, and softened edges—point to the histories embedded in each garment: the animal hide shaped through labor, the garment desired and worn, and the life once lived within it. Watson transforms these materials into compositions that hold memory, gesture, and the imprint of the human body.

Watson’s practice bridges sculpture, painting, and craft, placing her within a lineage of women artists who have explored material and embodiment, including Meret Oppenheim and Louise Bourgeois. Throughout, Watson remains committed to a process that honors the integrity of her materials while uncovering new possibilities within them.

Melanie Crader

Museum Director and Curator of Visual Arts, Guild Hall