Peter Kennard

Tony Blair photomontage by Peter Kennard at Santa's Grotto, London (2006)

Peter Kennard (born 17 February 1949) is a London born and based photomontage artist and senior tutor in photography at the Royal College of Art. Seeking to reflect his involvement in the anti-Vietnam War movement, he turned from painting to photomontage to better address his political views. He is best known for the images he created for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in the 1970s-80s.

Because many of the left-wing organisations and publications he used to work with have disappeared, Kennard has turned to using exhibitions, books and the internet for his work.

Kennard has work in the public collections of several major London museums and the The Arts Council of England. He has his work displayed as part of Tate Britain's permanent collection.

Education

Kennard was originally trained as a painter at the Slade School of Fine Art in London.

Exhibitions and projects

Since the build-up to the second Iraq War in 2002 Kennard has been working with artist Cat Picton Phillipps. John Berger has said of this collaborative work:

Peter Kennard and Cat Picton-Phillipps, in these memorable images, in these images that refuse to be forgotten, go very close to the griefs being inflicted – they are still-lifes of grief, and, at the same time includes the time-scale of the mountain. They are the opposite of news flashes. They are full of history’s irony, fury and anger at the mistakes made in its name. They reveal the tawdriness of the Gang’s half-truths. They acknowledge the pain of what is happening. They might be quoting Simone Weil who wrote: “There is a natural alliance between truth and affliction, because both of them are mute supplicants, eternally condemned to stand speechless in our presence.” And they are exemplary because, in face of such inevitable speechlessness, they remind us of the need to speak out in protest, the protests of the dead and the living.

In June 2007 Kennard and Picton-Phillips launched a new project in London, called 'Blairaq', to mark Tony Blair's last week as Prime Minister. The works were critical of Blair's key involvement in the second war against Iraq. Kennard is quoted as saying:

“We wanted to make really big work. The scale represents the extent of the destruction. We wanted it all to be much more physical than anything we had done before, and we hope that makes it easier for people to interact with it... We never conceived that our work would be part of persuading people to change their minds. Instead, we wanted to make art for the movement. We wanted people to be able to come and find their views echoed and validated by the work. To see in it the reasons why we marched and protested."

In 2008 Kennard and Picton-Phillips travelled to Bethlehem with the graffiti artist, Banksy, as part of an artists' movement in support of the local Palestinians.

Kennard's latest project in 2011 is @earth, a story without words told in the language of photomontages. It takes the form of a small book priced at £9.99, published by the Tate Gallery, which Kennard believed was a reasonably cheap and accessible way of getting his message to young people outside the artworld. The book contains a variety of images from Kennard's 40-year career and, as a result, attracts the criticism that its targets are too general. Kennard's reply was that he wanted "to encourage people to think about their own situation and activate, but I'm not trying to tell them to do this or that. I'm just trying to show how I see the world at the moment."

External links

• Peter Kennard homepage
• Kennardphillips.com