Dawn Clements work often begins as a small drawing of a single figure, object or space from life, film or TV. To these more paper is often added making the process a very organic way of drawing. The largest works stretch over and up walls in grand ornate compositions. Flowing over connected sheets of paper, they are pieced together into one seamless whole. Each chosen interior is conveyed using complex spatial perspectives. The drawings are never completely realist nor are they conceptual, Clements always responds to what she sees and never knows the end point of a drawing until she reaches it.
When Clements works from life she often looks at her own world, which is usually inside and finds it both comforting and claustrophobic. She has drawn her bed in bed, her kitchen table at the table, a Cape Cod vacation cottage that she was staying in and French doors in France. These drawings act as a release, challenging the often suffocating nature of a safe closed space. They enable these spaces to be seen from a different perspective at a different time, in a different place.
In Lamps (Black and White), 2010 drawn with Sumi ink, Clements navigates a chunk of her own domestic interior by drawing only what she is interested in and leaving blank anything that she is not. The ladies in the pattern of the lampshade, the texture of the wallpaper and the painted cast iron ornament sitting on the table all begin to have a relationship with one another, giving the viewer an uncanny feeling of seeing an inanimate space coming to life through someone else's point of view.
This chunk of Clement's domestic interior is repeated in Lamps (Color), 2010, using a shellac based ink she creates a richly saturated coloured drawing. This is the first time Clements has used this medium and the intense colour has a feel of old Technicolor films. It is not unusual for subjects to be repeated in the Still Lifes.
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