Dawn Clements’ Drawings
I’ve shown Dawn Clements’ work to students for years, and upon first sight someone will invariably ask me why she leaves so much paper “blank”. This is a perfectly reasonable question when one is used to looking at drawing in the usual ways, but Dawn Clements’ drawings are anything but usual. Seeing one of her pieces for the first time can be peculiarly disorienting. They directly reflect the ways in which she moves her eyes over objects and through spaces.
We’re not used to seeing this process of looking so concretely delineated, which inevitably results in seeming perceptual incongruities. We don’t look at the world around us from the same viewpoint or study everything we see with the same intensity, rather, our pace changes as we move our heads along with our eyes, glance at some objects while more closely observing others. The spaces left open or drawn with varying degrees of detail, in Clements’ works, where we must slow down, look slowly, or turn our gaze to another object, are equivalents to this process. Clements’ drawings shift, constantly locating themselves, as we do when observing the visible world in an attempt to truly understand it.
Clements’ paper – its surface undulations and wrinkles are real in the way that paper is real, physical, handled, sculptural. Clements touches (folds, creases, glues) every bit of the paper she uses. She often carries these massive pieces around with her, folded many times in order to be hand-held and portable. She takes them out to draw something she sees, then folds them up and moves on. Therefore, Clements’s drawings function as incremental demarcations of space, and, when unfolded, reveal themselves to be sprawling, map-like recordings of time. Everything she sees gets swept up in this process.
Clements’ works ask us to consider each thing she draws, from an intricate flower or a diamond ring, to a scrap of trash or the sticker on a piece of fruit, as the same, equal. For Dawn Clements, the act of drawing is synonymous with understanding, and the paper on which she draws is, in all its beautiful, perfect wear, a physical record of her time and place in the world.
Dawn Clements’ Love of Things, Hyperallergic
Dawn Clements, Studio Visit, Whitney