As a visual artist, drawing with charcoal, graphite, and ink is the foundation of my practice, and in sculpture I work with cardboard, plaster, wood, and clay (both hand-formed and slip-cast). With their limited palette I often allow the natural color of my materials to inform my work. While my use of color is sparing it is typically bold and mostly explored in work I have made in painting, photography, and digital art.
My performance work is centered on utilizing and deconstructing language while pushing the spectacular. As a playwright, I have directed and performed my own work both solo and in collaboration. Themes have included drones (civilian attacks by), bootstraps (pulling oneself up by), multi-level marketing, the paradox of zero, and cataclysmic events. I made my own confetti cannon and am willing to launch it at the drop of a hat.
My work has been described as cerebral, witty, funny, dark, innovative, and intelligent. I enjoy discovering various methods of repetition and accumulation in my process, which has included: slowly peeling back the top layer of cardboard to reveal the corrugation beneath and leave behind positive space, drawing a web of interconnected eyes or a horse skull over and over along the trajectory of a bouncy ball, creating an assembly line of alginate casts of my teeth, or writing a text in two parts for a performance, both with the same number of each letter and mark of punctuation. Regardless of its construction, my art is always meticulous. Whether I’m pushing the constraints of my materials or testing the boundaries of form and content, my goal is to continually employ loaded symbols and distorted associations that issue an invitation to reside in a conceptual space for both object and observer, physical or ephemeral.
–William Brattain, 2025
William Douglas Brattain was born in 1982 on the Llano Estacado plateau, in the South Plains of the Texas panhandle. He and his family on his maternal side are members of the Choctaw Tribe of Oklahoma.
At the beginning of the millennium, William moved to Seattle, WA to attend Cornish College of the Arts, earning a BFA in Theater in 2007. William also has a Certificate in Playwriting from the University of Washington Extension School, and most recently completed the Associates of Fine Art program at North Seattle College, graduating in Spring of 2025.
William was the recipient of an Honorable Mention and Juror’s Choice Award at the 2023 and 2025 North Seattle College Juried Student Shows.
As part of contemporary performance duo Etiquette, in collaboration with Mary Ferrario, William performed in residency at the Sou’wester Arts Week and Festival’s first and second years from 2020 to 2021.
William continues to live in Seattle, WA with his husband, Brandon.