orwhen you enter the room, face them. At first glance, they seem life-sized, these four horsemen. But then you realize that they are miniatures that have been placed on pedestals. At once, through this trick of scale and this gesture of placement, Hew Locke invites us to question the idea of what is “monumental.” Who can be immortalized? Which figures make it to the base? Why?
But The ambassadors (2021) it is also a series of highly disturbed objects with other inversions. Each is covered in materials, colors and textures that both reinforce and underplay their connotations of power.
They are loaded with strings of fake pearls, Mardi Gras beads, plastic flowers, netting, diapers, two-dimensional sculptural forms, wooden boxes and shredded regalia. Playful and monumental, earthy and mystical, they seem to gallop right out of the feverish imagination of Wilson Harris—a writer who, like Locke, traveled between Guyana and Britain.
“They come from an empire, from an imaginary state,” Locke says of his knights in a note in a room at London’s Hayward Gallery, where The ambassadors was exhibited last summer.
The series, among the artist’s latest works to appear in the UK, was part of it In Black Fantastican Afrofuturist exhibition curated by Ekow Eshun, which also included British artist Chris Ofili and American artist Kara Walker.
Locke was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1959, the eldest son of Guyanese sculptor Donald Locke and British painter Leila Locke (née Chaplin). The family moved to Guyana by boat when he was five, fueling Locke’s abiding interest in relics of navigation, colonialism and nationhood.
As a child living in the tropics—which inspired the yellow ocher tones of his mother’s paintings and the modernist forms of his father’s pieces—he witnessed Guyana’s independence in 1966.
“I saw the flag being projected,” Locke recalled recently. “We were allowed to stay awake at night to watch the surrender by the British to the Guyanese government. And that had a big impact on me. It gave me a lifelong interest in how nations are formed and what they choose as their symbols of nationhood.”
After the rise of Forbes Burnham, the family returned to Britain in 1980, during the reign of Margaret Thatcher. But Locke did not leave behind his wandering spirit.
This spirit – which this year has attracted wider attention in the UK and internationally – is infused with Caribbean cultural influences, including perhaps Trinidad’s theatrical Carnival, Guyana’s colorful Mashrama and the Bahamas’ rhythmic Junkanoo.
TheIn the same room of the Hayward Gallery this summer was a series of older life-size photographs by Locke called How you love me? The artist is featured in each image, but he is – deliberately – barely visible: he is overwhelmed with an abundant cornucopia of objects.
In “Saturn” (2007), he stands in front of a famous silhouette of the late Queen Elizabeth II. He holds a royal staff while fully laden with silk flowers, dolls, plastic mangoes, toy crowns, ribbons and beads.
Locke began the series wanting to satirize the metropolitan art world’s appetite for the latest “exotic” thing. But the spectacle here also pokes fun at the history of portraiture in general, particularly its association with the rich and powerful.
While Locke is somewhat agnostic when it comes to the institution of monarchy (“my political position is neither republican nor monarchist,” he once declared) he nonetheless brings an open sensitivity to the ideas of royalty—a sensitivity that is right. from the Caribbean ole mas and picong.
“It’s about messing around with all this cheap tattooing, but trying to elevate it to something much higher,” says Locke. “I do work in which there is a lot of difficulty… maybe challenge, maybe conflict.”
In these images, which somehow refract and echo The ambassadorsthe ridiculousness of claims to power is exposed as that same power is redistributed elsewhere—and, in the process, rehabilitated.
SCale is crucial in Locke’s work. The procession – a commission currently on display in London at Tate Britain – feels both epic and intimate. A parade of colorfully costumed figures stretches before us through a grand gallery space. Some are life-sized, but some look small: maybe children or, as in The ambassadorsminiature.
Gold and shimmering materials rub against each other in a collage of rough textures, flags and custom-made strips of fabric – some of which are hand-painted by the artist. The Trinidadian garnet figure Pierrot – a traditional carnival character who spouts strings and wears colorful cloth belts – looms large.
But while Pierrot speaks, these figures are silent. While Pierrot holds a rod and even dances, these figures—insofar as they suggest movement—are still, much like the strangely uncomfortable figures of Bling Kingdom, presented at the International Institute of Visual Arts London in 2008.
The effect creates a kind of productive claustrophobia. The artist has filled the space, but in the process invites us to have intimate engagements in a journey from one point to another.
“I think about The procession like an epic poem,” says Locke. “How this part is perceived over time will change and evolve.”
This sense of evolution is the key to Money exchangea temporary installation in Birmingham’s Victoria Square was also organized earlier this year, coinciding with the city’s hosting of the Commonwealth Games.
In a previous show – Here’s the thing, a 2019 retrospective held at Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery – Locke hung several miniature boats in the space alongside busts of Queen Elizabeth II. But here, a statue of Queen Victoria is encased in a single boat sculpture. And that boat is filled with several replicas of the Victoria statue. The movement suggests the multiple meanings of history that emerge with different perspectives.
“It’s about complexity, it’s about the messiness of history,” Locke says.
And yet the stasis of both works raises the idea of something trapped in a moment in time: a calm before the storm. Abundance and optimism meet fear and stagnation. Each piece in the procession of the artist’s increasingly ambitious output can be a portrait of the artist’s greatest desire—the artist’s own.
“It’s about hope,” Locke says of what he’s doing. “It is a positive movement of people. They are passing on to another life.”
Hew Locke’s The procession is on display at Tate Britain in London until 22 January 2023
