“Not everybody can be admitted to the temple”, begins Clements’s video essay. Her heroine, clad in a robe fashioned on a hospital gown, struts around a sixteenth-century Catholic shrine. The sight of her peering into the healing waters of a holy well, as she complains of infirmity and delusion, sets up a poignant contradiction. In it, faith and health might meet. Yet the words that follow do little to resolve it, turning the piece into a shallow tirade against human irrationality.
It takes a lot to pull off an essay film, granted, and Clements is no essayist. Her self-referential audio descriptions and access bumph in place of content point only to instrumental introversion. Yet the project is dully predicable in PEER’s programme under Ellen Grieg. Her exhibitions dwell in the banal purgatory of the old hat ‘systemic disadvantage’ grift. With Clements, that system could have been otherworldly, but the critique is merely opaque.
