Julian Watts Sculpts Wood | iGNANT.com

A fateful job in a wood workshop lead San Francisco-based artist Julian Watts to a sculptural practice based in the interstice between art and craft.

Throughout his undergraduate degree as a sculpture major in Fine Arts at the University of Oregon, Watts never worked with wood. After graduating in 2012, he returned to his hometown of San Francisco, there he began working in a furniture workshop that specialized in tables. It was during this period that Watts began to apply his cumulative knowledge of woodwork to his sculptural practice. Today, Watts’ work is based upon the traditional wood carving and furniture making techniques that he stumbled upon in that workshop. He creates sculptural pieces that allude to function and domestic objects in the subtleties of their form. Their unexpected shapes appear the have grown organically from the wood; knots and furls becoming features of the sculptures themselves.