Sculptor and assemblage artist, born in London, who spent his childhood in Canada and attended a boys’ grammar school in England. He joined the Merchant Navy for four years, then studied painting at Farnham and Wimbledon Schools of Art. In the early 1970s he moved to west Cornwall and pursued sculpture. He scouted the countryside for old farm machinery and industrial scrap and from this created strange beasts and insects. The Arts Council’s The Beetle and its The Electro-Griffin are good examples. Northern Arts and public galleries in Glasgow, Manchester, Sheffield and Wolverhampton hold Kemp’s work. Kemp was artist-in-residence at several sites where he would construct his witty creations “as a future archaeologist reconstructing the machines and artefacts of a distant past”.

Text source: 'Artists in Britain Since 1945' by David Buckman (Art Dictionaries Ltd, part of Sansom & Company)


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