Cat Phillipps + Peter Kennard 'Photo Op' Print Available

Artists: Cat Phillipps + Peter Kennard
Title: Photo Op
Medium: Photo Lithographic Print
Size: 49 x 49 cm
Edition: UNSURE
Price: £75 

 

Cat Phillipps is a British artist and printmaker based in London who uses bold graphics and stark contrast to question power, memory and national myth. Born in the Midlands and trained at the Royal College of Art, she works primarily in screen print, combining hand drawn imagery with found photographs and archival material to build layered compositions that feel both urgent and timeless. Her palette is restricted to black, white and flashes of red, a deliberate choice that amplifies the emotional charge of each piece while echoing the visual language of propaganda posters and newsprint.

Phillipps first gained notice for Proud Haddock, a series that reimagines historical British symbols as fragile, crumbling icons, suggesting that imperial glory is built on shifting sand. She cuts stencils directly from old maps, military ledgers and children’s storybooks, then overlaps them until portraits of generals dissolve into silhouettes of factory workers, creating visual collisions that ask who is remembered and who is erased. The process is physical: ink is pushed through mesh by hand, registration is intentionally misaligned, and tears in the paper are left visible, evidence that history itself is imperfect and contested.

Recent exhibitions at the Imperial War Museum, Peckham Platform and group shows across Europe have drawn critical acclaim, while her prints are held in the collections of the British Library and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Alongside studio work she runs community workshops, teaching teenagers to cut their own stencils and question the monuments they walk past every day.

Whether producing a pocket sized zine or a three metre wall piece, Phillipps approaches every surface with the same intent: make the viewer stop, look again, and confront the stories that nations tell about themselves.

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Peter Kennard is a British artist and educator born in London in 1949, widely regarded as one of the most influential political artists of his generation. He studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and the Royal College of Art, where he began developing a practice that fuses photomontage, painting, and digital media to interrogate power, war, and social injustice. Rejecting traditional notions of beauty, Kennard uses found images, newspaper photographs, and official documents, tearing and recombining them to create jarring visual critiques that disrupt the narratives of mass media.

His breakthrough series Haywain with Cruise Missiles (1981) reimagines Constable’s pastoral painting as a nuclear battlefield, replacing the rural idyll with a convoy of warheads, a visual that became iconic in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament movement. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Kennard produced searing photomontages addressing the Falklands War, the Gulf War, and the arms trade, often collaborating with activists and writers to distribute his work on posters, postcards, and banners. His technique is raw and immediate: images are torn, burned, and re-photographed, then overlaid with aggressive brushwork, creating compositions that feel both urgent and timeless.

In recent years, Kennard has embraced digital tools while retaining his signature fragmentation, producing works that confront climate collapse, surveillance capitalism, and the refugee crisis. Exhibitions at the Imperial War Museum, Tate Modern, and the Victoria and Albert Museum have cemented his reputation, yet he continues to prioritize accessibility, posting new works online and distributing prints at protests. Whether producing a postcard or a museum installation, Kennard’s mission remains constant: to make visible the violence and inequality that official images conceal, and to empower viewers to question the world they inhabit.

Peter Kennard + War Boutique 'Shooting @ Earth' Art Show Details

Check it out HERE