Written by Sara Alnashi
Alison Watt, Sabine, 2000, Oil on canvas, 213.50 x 213.50 cm Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern One)
Draped Meanings: Alison Watt and the Feminine Language of Cloth
In the hushed glow of a gallery wall, Alison Watt’s monumental paintings do more than capture folds of fabric—they whisper, question, and seduce. Her canvases, both tactile and elusive, summon a femininity that resists objectification. To fully enter Watt’s world of ghostly cloth and absent bodies, one might turn to philosopher and feminist theorist Luce Irigaray, whose radical writings on language, gender, and representation offer a powerful lens through which to unravel the meanings behind Watt’s work.
Alison Watt, Hood, 2003, oil on canvas
Beyond the Veil: Painting the Absent Body
Watt first drew attention with figurative, light-filled portraits of women, but it was her shift to paintings of pure fabric—Fold (1997), Shift (2000), and Phantom (2008)—that marked her transformation as an artist. These later works omit the female figure altogether, focusing instead on the cloth that once touched her skin. In this gesture of removal, we find a kind of unveiling—not of the naked body, but of its trace, its imprint, its absence.
The cloth, no longer a passive drape over the body, takes center stage. Watt paints its folds with intense precision and sensuality, making fabric appear alive—fluid, breathing, resistant to containment. Here, Luce Irigaray’s theory of feminine expression becomes illuminating.
Alison Watt, Phantom, 2008, oil on canvas, 213.4 x 335.3 cm
Lips That Refuse Silence
In her iconic essay “When Our Lips Speak Together”, Irigaray introduces the metaphor of the “lips”—not just as anatomy, but as a discursive challenge to patriarchal language and thought. Where male discourse privileges vision, hierarchy, and linear meaning, Irigaray proposes a feminine language of touch, proximity, and multiplicity. She writes not in fixed declarations but in fragments and repetitions—echoes of how women experience the world: not as objects to be seen, but as subjects who feel.
Watt’s draperies are, in this sense, Irigaray’s “lips” in visual form—they fold, press, and blur the line between inside and outside, between the body and its image. They are not coverings; they are surfaces of contact, inviting a viewer not to master with the eye, but to approach with the senses.
Entrevista a Luce Irigaray, 2013
Undoing Ingres: Fetish, Fashion, and Feminist Rebellion
Watt’s fascination with Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, the 19th-century French painter known for his opulent female portraits, becomes a site of critique. Ingres, revered for his sumptuous rendering of fabric, often used drapery to eroticize and control the female body. The cloth in his work is a fetish, a “second skin” that both reveals and conceals, serving the male gaze.
Watt responds not by rejecting Ingres, but by unraveling him. Her paintings take his obsession with cloth and stretch it to abstraction. The fetish object is isolated—magnified until it ceases to serve desire. The body, fragmented or absent, no longer offers itself for consumption. Instead, we encounter drapery that resists narrative, identity, even gender. Watt turns fashion’s artifice into a site of meditation—and resistance.
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Joséphine-Éléonore-Marie-Pauline de Galard de Brassac de Béarn (1825–1860), Princesse de Broglie, 1851–53, Oil on canvas, 47 3/4 × 35 3/4 in. (121.3 × 90.8 cm)
The Fold as Feminine Logic
Irigaray’s writings speak often of the “fold”, a concept she uses both philosophically and sensually. For her, the feminine is not a singular, stable form but a continuous movement—a folding in of self and other, word and body, touch and thought. In Watt’s paintings, the fold becomes a visual grammar for Irigaray’s logic of the plural, the non-fixed, the constantly becoming.
These folds aren’t just fabric—they are liminal spaces, where presence and absence, subject and object, begin to blur. Art critic John Calcutt describes Watt’s use of trompe l’oeil as creating “a fold in which time, space, and self-consciousness constantly wrap around one another.” This visual instability echoes Irigaray’s refusal of patriarchal certainty. Like Irigaray’s prose, Watt’s cloth seduces with ambiguity.
Alison Watt, Suspend, 1999, oil on canvas
A Language of the Body Without the Body
What Irigaray does to language, Watt does to the gaze. Both artists refuse closure. They dismantle structures that define women only in relation to male desire—phallus or frame, sentence or silhouette. Irigaray’s woman speaks in many voices, her language fluid, her meaning never fixed. Watt’s woman is not shown—but she haunts. Her body is not there, but her trace remains in every fold and ripple.
In removing the body, Watt paradoxically makes it more present. It’s a quiet revolution—one that requires not spectacle, but attention. Her paintings ask us to slow down, to look without grasping, to feel without possessing.
Art as Feminine Thought
Through the lens of Luce Irigaray, Alison Watt’s paintings are more than elegant studies of fabric. They are radical acts of re-seeing—visual essays that reimagine the relationship between femininity, representation, and the gaze. In each canvas, the folds speak—not in the language of logic or mastery, but in whispers, silences, and touches. They are lips that refuse to be closed.
