Born in London in 1955, Clayden completed her BA Honours at Central School of Art & Design and Post Graduate Diploma at the Royal Academy Schools. She studied life drawing for six years under the inspirational tutorage of Cecil Collins. Her paintings are noted for their unusual and breath-taking imagery combined with a stunning layered surface, which is built from a powerful instinctive link to the world of the unconscious and of myth.
‘Everything may come about by chance but nothing is accidental. However much the hand, which makes the surface, may seem to be acting autonomously, the mind evidently puts in what the mind subsequently extracts. These are definitely modern myths, the product of a modern sensibility. But the great unconscious that they are drawn from belongs to everybody’ John Russell-Taylor