Peter Kennard Badges

Peter Kennard is Britain's leading political photomonteur — making stark, memorable anti-war images that move between street and gallery, with long, explicit ties to CND, and which have been widely reproduced as badges and postcards.

>Peter Kennard is Britain’s leading political photomonteur - making stark, memorable anti-war images that move between street and gallery, with long, explicit ties to CND, and which have been widely reproduced as badges and postcards.

Background

Peter Kennard is a British artist best known for political photomontage - cutting, splicing and re-staging photographs to confront war, nuclear weapons and state violence. Since the 1970s he has been one of the most recognisable visual voices supporting the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), placing art directly into the heart of protest.

Signature images and themes

Kennard’s best-known works use simple, shocking juxtapositions to compress complex arguments into a single glance: missiles grafted onto pastoral landscapes; a globe bandaged like a wounded patient; a peace sign built from bones; a hand crushing a warhead. “Art in itself doesn’t change anything, but when it’s aligned to a political movement, it becomes its visual arm,” he says - a summary of why his pictures were made for marches as much as for museums.

Icons include Haywain with Cruise Missiles (1980/81), a détournement of Constable’s landscape that became a defining anti-nuclear image. Across decades he returns to core themes - anti-nuclear campaigning, anti-war solidarity, climate and resource justice, and the hidden human costs of policy and propaganda. The tone is urgent, public-facing and clear.

Art for movements, not just museums

His practice grew alongside grassroots campaigns - peace marches, Greenham Common activism, opposition to Cruise and Trident. Posters bearing his images gave a shared graphic identity to CND demonstrations. Kennard recalls: “I wanted to try and make images that showed the horror and madness of the nuclear arms race… I got involved with CND… to make images that rendered [nuclear weapons] unacceptable.” For Kennard, museums and galleries were always secondary - the street, the rally and the community hall were the primary places his art belonged.

Badges, postcards and popular culture

What makes Kennard unusual among political artists is how widely his work has been reproduced outside the gallery. CND, peace groups and local activists turned his montages into posters carried on marches, postcards sold to raise funds, and badges worn as everyday statements. Designs such as the shattered missile over a peace symbol, or Haywain with Cruise Missiles, became emblems - carried in pockets, pinned to coats and mailed across networks of solidarity. This popular circulation gave his work a life far beyond the art world, embedding it in the shared visual memory of the British peace movement.

For badger4peace, which values badges and collectable culture, Kennard’s output shows how a small object - a badge or postcard - can distil and spread a movement’s message, turning high-stakes critique into intimate, repeatable acts of solidarity.

Methods and materials

Early montages were made with scissors, glue and darkroom craft; later pieces add digital compositing while keeping a raw, handmade look. Grain, torn edges and visible joins signal urgency, honesty and a do-it-yourself ethic that any community can adopt. Kennard frames his motive plainly: “My art erupts from outrage… my aim is to unmask the connection,” he writes of linking profit, war and climate crisis.

Why it resonates with badger4peace

Kennard’s practice speaks directly to badger4peace’s concerns:

• Peace first - images refuse to normalise war or nuclear threat and humanise consequences.
• Collectable culture - posters, postcards and badges turn art into democratic objects: accessible, repeatable and shared rather than locked away.
• Care for the living world - montages that show damaged landscapes link environmental justice with anti-war work.
• Participation - the methods invite community adaptation through workshops, schools and local campaigns.

CND collaborations and quotes

Kennard has a long collaborative relationship with CND. He has produced work specifically for campaigns, exhibitions and educational materials, and his images have helped visualise the movement’s moral claims. Representative quotations include:

• “Art in itself doesn’t change anything, but when it’s aligned to a political movement, it becomes its visual arm.”
• “I wanted to… make images that rendered [nuclear weapons] unacceptable… it is protest by the people that can break the missiles of destruction.”
• CND has noted works such as Never Again as attempts to reconnect the mushroom cloud with its human consequences.

Legacy and relevance now

Kennard’s toolkit remains useful: reuse public imagery, make the join visible, speak plainly and circulate widely. In an age of scrolling feeds and fast news, the directness of photomontage still cuts through. For badger4peace this suggests practical activity - turning striking images into collectable formats (small prints, postcards, pin-badges) that travel with people and keep the message alive, protecting people, animals and places from harm.