Peter Kettle is a Welsh-born British contemporary artist and filmmaker based between Wiltshire and Bristol. His practice explores the relationship between landscape, memory and myth, and the strange histories that lie beneath the surface of a place.

Kettle's curiosity about the world was shaped early by his parents. His mother, a broadcast journalist for the BBC World Service, travelled extensively researching stories, at times taking considerable personal risks, including smuggling recordings and interviews documenting abuses out of apartheid-era South Africa. His father, a teacher of philosophy and theology, encouraged an introspective understanding of the world, alongside a lifelong enthusiasm for climbing, hiking and wild camping. Together, these influences fostered an enduring interest in exploration, storytelling and how we perceive the world around us.

Kettle studied Art and Design Foundation at Howard Gardens in Cardiff before developing his practice independently. He now works from BV Studios in Bristol, alongside artists from a range of disciplines.

His expeditions across the Himalayas, Japanese Alps, Mount Kenya and the Canadian wilderness form an ongoing fieldwork practice, exploring the relationship between people, place and cultural memory. A roll of canvas accompanies him into the mountains, often to their summits, where marks, impressions and rubbings are taken directly from the terrain.

Alongside his paintings, Kettle creates documentary films with friend and filmmaker Al Green through Green Kettle Productions. Their ongoing series, Revered Landscapes, investigates how people live, work and understand the environments surrounding some of the world's most culturally significant mountains. Their most recent expedition to East Africa in 2026 brought them into conversation with artists, farmers, guides, and local and Indigenous communities, exploring how landscape shapes identity, livelihood, belief and belonging. These encounters offer perspectives beyond Kettle's own experience, deepening his understanding of each place and informing the paintings that emerge from it.

This interest also informs his collaborations. Working with somatic movement artist Jan Ming Lee, Kettle created a film and series of paintings across the ancient stone circles, woodlands and coastlines of Somerset and the Bristol region. Drawing on the folklore and spiritual heritage of these places, the project explored the contemporary resurgence of nature-based spiritualities and our enduring instinct to find meaning in the natural world.

Back in the studio, these physical traces become the foundations of his paintings. Working with oil, shellac, raw pigments and mixed media, Kettle builds and erodes surfaces through concealment and reconstruction. Much of the process unfolds on the studio floor, adopting an almost cartographic approach from above, before the paintings eventually find their way onto the wall.

His increasingly abstract paintings explore permanence and impermanence, where geological forms, cultural mythologies and personal memories become entangled, giving rise to stranger fictions of their own. The landscape becomes less a place to describe than a place to question, where even the familiar can begin to feel profoundly strange.