Phillippa Clayden was born in London and has been based in Truro since 2012. She obtained a BA (Hons) at London's Central School of Art & Design, and a postgraduate diploma at the Royal Academy schools. She won the Landseer and Dorothy Morgan prizes in 1981 and 1982. Her work has been exhibited both in the UK and abroad.

The art critic John Russell Taylor has said: ‘In every sense, literal and metaphorical, Clayden's work is many layered. Its impact on the emotions and the instincts powerfully immediate, but one can come back to it again and again, and see new subtleties without losing at all the first amazing impact, the sense of the simplicity behind the subtlety behind the simplicity’.