Sarah Myerscough Gallery

Julian Watts | Available Work

Julian Watts is an artist and woodworker based in Alpine, Oregon. After earning a BFA in Sculpture from the University of Oregon in 2012, Julian returned to his hometown of San Francisco to apprentice under furniture makers before beginning his practice. His work has been exhibited internationally in recent solo shows and has been featured in numerous art and design fairs, including Design Miami/Basel, Design Miami, FOG San Francisco, PAD London and the London Design Festival. His work has been shown at the UK’s Design Museum and the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, USA. He has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, Architectural Digest, The New Yorker, and American Craft Magazine. In 2018, he was shortlisted for the Loewe Craft Prize. Julian has taught courses at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts and the Anderson Ranch Arts Center, both USA and was the Wornick Distinguished Visiting Professor of Wood Arts at California College of the Arts, USA.

Watt’s knowledge of wood is significant and defined by his skill, but his output is playful, uncanny, even grotesque. Something familiar lurks, yet it remains ungrasped: identifiable forms toy with repressed subject matters and play. The works could be collected from the forest floor, or refer to bodily silhouettes, yet they belong to an imagined elsewhere. Distinct from the everyday, all while gathering in the domestic sphere. There is humour embedded in the artist’s meticulous and precise carvings. Perhaps, even satire, as the works insinuate erotic motifs, or even, our own bodily functions. An approach so reliant on suggestion it allows for the viewer/user’s own associations to become central to the sculpture itself. Our powers for projection are rendered bashfully apparent. The sculptor’s work is indelibly marked by living in rural Oregon and the complex relationship the geography has to timber and industry. Being here, Watts stresses hyper-efficiency in such elemental terrain and the masculine coded practices of working with wood in rural contexts. The artist probes such themes via a practice that walks the line between use and playfully useless. Homely, or not quite.