Dawn Clements


Dawn Clements was an American contemporary artist and educator. She was known for her large scale, panoramic drawings of interiors that were created with many different materials in a collage-style. Her primary mediums were sumi ink and ballpoint pen on small to large scale paper panels. In order to complete a drawing she cut and pastes paper to edit things and achieve the desired scale. Her completed drawings show her process of editing and adding through wrinkles and folds. She described her work as “a kind of visual diary of what see, touch, and desire. As I move between the mundane empirical spaces of my apartment and studio, and the glamorous fictions of movies, apparently seamless environments are disturbed through ever-shifting points of view.”

Early life and education

Clements was born in Woburn, Massachusetts in 1958. She received her M.F.A. from the State University of New York at Albany in 1989 and her B.A. from Brown University in 1986.

Work

Clements made large-scale drawings which explored interior spaces. She mostly made drawings from her surroundings and time-based media. She was especially interested in the spaces that women occupy.
Clements' drawing Mrs. Jessica Drummond's was featured in the 2010 Whitney Biennial. It's a drawing of the bedroom of the main character in the film My Reputation in ballpoint pen. Unlike most of her interiors, this drawing depicts the actress Barbara Stanwyck playing Jessica Drummond. The drawing is a combination of several scenes and shows different moments and camera angles in the room.
Clements taught classes in fine arts at Rhode Island School of Design, Maryland Institute College of Art, California Institute of the Arts, Brooklyn College, and Princeton University.
She received many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts in 2012, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship in 2013, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship in 2015.
Clements died December 4, 2018 in Bronx, New York, after a battle with breast cancer.

Exhibitions

Select solo exhibitions
Select group exhibitions