"You Were Supposed to Tell the Truth and Not Let Us Burn"

Clementine Eastwood

Slay Your Dragon (Part One) by Clementine Eastwood is part of the Director’s Picks collection - watch Director Sarah Ryan’s video reflection on this powerful piece.

Clementine Eastwood’s textile hangings are deftly woven iconographies, with religious symbolism deployed by the artist casting an eye over the history of depictions of women. She renders them with new colour and dynamism: the shapes fluid and acute. “Tufted yarn through monks cloth on stained wood bedazzled with pearls” reads one of the accounts of materials used, which is suggestive of the descriptive potency of these works. They are fairly large-scale, magnificent on the wall: but vital, good humoured, and in this way accessible for the modern viewer. 

With yellow flowers and blue and red

That shine so bright in sun's clear ray

So goes the famous mediaeval poem ‘Pearl’. Some of Clementine's hangings look like portals. These are the more abstract ones, gesturing to rarefied states of being: the experience of transportation so exquisitely rendered by mediaeval poets, mystics, artists and nuns. The lives of the saints are often meant to act as illuminating mirrors. In these wall hangings duality is expressed by symmetry; the iconography of the faces is familiar as well as heroic. From Faith Ringgold to Grayson Perry, contemporary artists are doing thrilling things with textiles. Clementine’s startling forms and searing colours make for bold and skilled interventions.