Clio Lloyd-Jacob

Clio Lloyd-Jacob is an artist, art therapist and curator based in Cambridge. Her practice moves across painting, contemporary miniatures, printmaking, drawing, film, performance and installation, with the form of each work shifting according to its purpose.

She grew up between London and New York and trained at St Martin's School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art, then spent five years in Paris before returning to London and later settling in Cambridge. Her work is held in private collections in the UK and abroad.

Her work looks at how fragments of civilisations are carried forward from one generation to the next, their meanings continually shifting as they go. Her research and making are often collaborative, and she weighs questions of power closely within her process. Supported by an Arts Council England project grant, she spent six months co-creating The Watering Place (2022) with an NHS mental health team: a mural and accompanying film exploring the idea of a group mind and the ways in which members of a community affect one another.

Since then, thinking about scale, consumption and durability, she has developed forms of visual, temporal and spatial compression drawn from Persian and Mughal miniature traditions, alongside Medieval European and contemporary Pakistani miniature painting. Two residencies in Pakistan, in 1989 and 2003, gave her first-hand experience of changing architecture, and her work considers the continuing legacies of British colonial history, the conditions that shape the international flow of ideas and materials, and her own position within them. Her printmaking includes a set of reworked print fragments begun during an AA2A residency at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, part of a wider body of work on exclusion and precarity. She has also collaborated with the Lahore-based artist Noor Ali Chagani, including work shown at the British Ceramics Biennial.