The main theme I explore is female subjectivity, experience and body. My focus is to challenge the portrayal of women in religious art, especially religious female icons such as the Madonna. I want to express my response to this symbolic imagery; I aim to shed a different light on the representation of women by taking the iconical portrayals of women as symbols, heroines, martyrs, Olympias or Odalisques and communicating their suffering and injustice they have endured over centuries.

My pieces are highly inspired by medieval tapestries, paintings and also mythical creatures. My latest piece “Take care of our innocence” is a nod to my younger self where the symbol of the unicorn represents peace, innocence, a mythical very much present in a little girl’s childhood is now juxtaposed against trauma. I am now looking back at that time of innocence from my current position as a young female adult.

I additionally investigate duality in my practice as I believe there are always two versions, in human beings and in the universe. Metaphorically speaking, there's a duality in everything. Peace and war, love and hate, up and down, and black and white.The idea that every single human being has good and evil within them. I strive to transfer a feeling of unknown, unfamiliarity to the viewer. There is a hidden library of symbols within our subconscious.

My art practice has a strong focus on the act of making, my medium is called “Tufting”; A modern form of rug making, tapestry embroidery, by employing an electric tufting gun. I use yarn as my paint and my gun as my paint brush, moving away from the conventional form of painting. By using a gun, a more masculine tool, I convey female expression, and I explore my own identity as a woman in modern times. Just like these symbols I break down the male gaze, I reclaim them and celebrate them.

Clementine Eastwood is a young textile artist who graduated with First Class Honors from Brighton University, studying fine art painting. Since graduating Clementine lives and produces work from her home in Brighton. She has pushed her textile works even further since her degree by creating her skillfully tufted iconographies reminiscing old tapestries from the middle ages, exploring an ancient language of religious symbolisms. The artist is 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 jewels” 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 humored, and in this way accessible for the modern viewer.