Dawn Clements

"Clements has a voracious appetite for what she sees – and also what she hears. Her drawings are flecked with handwritten snippets of dialogue, advertising slogans, famous names. Like pages from an articulate visual diary, her work records internal and external worlds simultaneously, seamlessly. (Leah Ollman, Los Angeles Times)

Dawn Clements doesn’t necessarily intend her drawings to become panoramic in scale. She begins with small pieces of paper and draws in ballpoint pen, or paints in black ink, a slice of what she sees; in particular, her own domestic environment, or interiors and characters from film and melodrama. But sometimes these small works don’t seem complete, so she glues another section of paper to the drawing and continues. This can go on for weeks, months, or years, resulting in drawings ranging in size from 11 feet in diameter to 72 feet in length.

From [my] interests in the dynamics of ‘inside’ (home, cave, cabin, cell), I have been producing large panoramic works on paper of my own domestic environment as well as drawings of spaces and figures from melodramatic movies and soap operas.

Dawn Clements
Conditions of Desire