Biography Ian Kennedy

My Scottish grandfather, a collector and amateur painter, first drew my attention to art and it was with his encouragement that I started to paint. At school near Edinburgh I had a remarkably knowledgeable friend, later a well known art critic, who opened my eyes to the excitement of modern art and it was there too that I took advantage of the very accessible studio space to avoid the sports field and started my life-long habit of spending as much time as possible in galleries.

By the mid 1960s, whilst at Bristol University, I was making “assemblages”. “Wall #1” [1964. 122cmx122cm] was a response to the crumbling wall surfaces and political graffiti that I had seen in Paris earlier in the decade. The surface of the work, formed using quick drying dental plaster and paint, is comprised of bits and pieces that I had found. “Black Steel#3” [1969. 74cmx100cm] made use of a rusty metal sheet coated with pitch, which I had retrieved from a disused quarry.

By about 1970, some sort of a process seems to have been emerging. I had always sketched and photographed what I now realise was fundamentally pattern and texture, wherever I found it. I already particularly liked demolition sites (and even bomb sites still in those days) and I still love them. Intimate domestic settings now juxtaposing colour schemes and functions in unintended ways, exposing a lone fireplace, the scar of a staircase, weathered wallpaper, a door to nowhere, to form a gigantic abstract artwork.

I find visual stimulus everywhere, from a patched road surface, a crop pattern in a landscape or simply in something I find -abandoned, damaged or redundant. The “found object” is really the key to what I do. I am an inveterate scavenger and hoarder and make art out of whatever I can find. A walk on the beach is only really worthwhile if it throws up a few bits of interesting driftwood and rubbish skips offer rich pickings! The essential thing is that everything I use has had a previous life. Whether or not that ‘previous life’ can be discerned in the finished piece is neither here nor there. I only need each component to contribute to the whole.

For instance, I have recently been making a series of works out of the probably pre-war wooden fuse boxes discarded when re-wiring a house. On a couple of these pieces I have left the old paper labels, partially obscured now and just part of the overall texture and design of the finished work. Occasionally however I do make pieces where everything used has a shared history - a particular beach walk or a house or barn clearance – and inevitably these pieces have a certain nostalgic overlay for me. Whilst this shared history might be hinted at in the title of the work, the pieces should work in purely aesthetic terms and not require ‘inside information’.

Actually, the process of making a work is quite prosaic: I select stuff that appeals to me and I put it alongside other stuff and in some way the whole becomes something completely different.