Hew Locke: Living history

If you want to be an artist, the British Museum is the place you go. You go to look at the stuff of the past. So I come here to think, to know my thoughts, to ramble. I've often said if I wasn't an artist, I was going to be a historian. So here I am, an artist-historian going through the British Museum collection.

I was born in Edinburgh but I grew up in Guyana. I arrived in Guyana as a child, just in time to see the country becoming independent. I saw a nation being born, I saw the flag created, the new coat of arms being designed in part by a friend of ours. We all saw the new Guyana dollar bills being made – they were exciting times.

As an artist, I often look back to Guyana and think where did my ideas come from? Where did the core of my practice come from?  

At five years old I travelled to Guyana by boat, and that had a significant impact on me psychologically. Guyana is called the 'land of many waters'. To travel anywhere in Guyana, you needed, in those days, to go by boat. I lived in the coastal region of Guyana, and the breeze cooling you down was known as the 'trade winds'. The trade winds were to do with the triangular trade in enslaved people between Europe, Africa and the Americas. When you're living in a country that has a particularly dark colonial history, this is part of your everyday existence. All of that knowledge leads to an interest in history, sometimes from a very personal point of view.

The school I went to was called Queen's College. I took for granted the fact that it was named after Queen Victoria and that the school crest was an image of a massive trading ship. All these things go into shaping your mind without you realising it. It's had a massive impact on what symbols mean to me. There's always a reason why this statue is in this particular place, why this object is in that particular museum, why it's displayed in this particular way.

I look back to things like walking past a statue every day on the way to school. It was a marble statue of Queen Victoria which was quite prominent outside what were once called the Victoria Law Courts, but became the Guyana Law Courts after independence. Amid independence struggles, the statue's nose had been blown off, her arm was lost, and I saw that statue removed from there when Guyana became a Republic. It was dumped, as we say in Guyana, 'behind God's back', at the bottom of the botanical gardens. It was quite a shock to see this figure lying on its side.

The statue was actually moved back again to its original position about 20 years later, because the power had been drained from the figure. It no longer reminded people of colonial times. It just reminded people of past things; of the fact that things had moved on. That was interesting. In other words, people's memories and ideas of an object can shift and change.
 

My work is about empire and the complicated messiness of history. The formation of nationhood coming out of difficult pasts is something that has always interested me: the way nations create themselves, the symbols they use to state their position of nationhood, the face that they depict to the world. Even the fact that this is the 'British Museum' is about power – national power. In the same way that I talk about symbols of nationhood in Guyana, this museum is a symbol of British nationhood.   

My approach with this particular exhibition has been to go around the Museum, with the help of some very helpful curators, selecting certain objects for display.

I've selected work largely from Caribbean, African, Asian and European sources. This is a reflection of the makeup of Guyanese society, which was shaped by a colonial period. Nearly 40% of the population are descended from Indian indentured servants, then the next largest group are descended from African slaves. And then another large group, a much smaller minority but a very significant group, are Indigenous Amerindian people. This is a society I grew up in: a multicultural society, before that word was invented. That's what I'm looking for when I come to the British Museum collections.

The objects have been chosen partly because they're beautiful – and even when the objects seem to be a bit ordinary, the story is extraordinary. Sometimes the objects look really beautiful but have very dark stories. This is an exhibition full of interesting stories, bizarre stories. I hope people will be moved by them, because some are quite tragic and some are quite emotional. It's a show for people who like a good tale, even if the tale is not a happy one.

This is a very complex show because it's taking on a difficult subject matter. But what's important is that I'm not telling people what to think. I present a set of facts, a series of stories, but then you make up your own mind. At times I'm even questioning what I think! The whole thing about this show is about debate; in-depth, serious dialogue. Let's have a conversation, but let's have a conversation where we face up to stuff properly. 

When it comes to seeing objects from the past, virtual stuff is fine, but seeing the real thing is extraordinary. Knowing a prince held this with his hands, seeing objects belonging to rulers, or to ordinary, everyday people – seeing them for real, that's extraordinary. You're looking at living history.

One object that was personally important to me was seeing an Amerindian war club, collected by Robert Schomburgk, because I played with one of these clubs when I was a kid. It's a very strange present to give a child, you know – 'Hey, here's this war club. Don't hit your brother on the head with it'. But it was really quite an extraordinary thing. Both my parents were artists, and so I grew up with Amerindian artefacts around the house and I've got some of these things at home today as well.

But the other reason why it is important is because Schomburgk is highly significant in Guyana. He drew the border line between Guyana and what became Venezuela. Today, we have a border controversy or dispute between Guyana and Venezuela. This club looks like one thing to a visiting audience, but to me it looks like many other things. It's a representation of Amerindian presence, of Amerindian crafts, ship craft, craft work, but it's also a symbol of history having a knock-on effect. I've been going through history as a real thing. The past affects the present; we can't get away from it. We may like to think we can, but it will come back to bite you. We live with the burden of history.

The new work I've made for this show includes a bust of Queen Victoria and the Watchers. The Watchers are these strange, masked figures operating above the whole exhibition, looking down like a Greek chorus. They're almost up in Olympus looking down at us mere mortals, either pointing at you or looking at you from the shadows.

What are they talking about? Are they judging you? Are they judging me? Are they guardians of history? I still haven't completely made up my mind, and the ambiguity is important. They're also commenting on the general situation, the time, the show itself. How I feel about them fluctuates.

The show is different to the shows I've put on at other institutions. If you show work in a contemporary art gallery, you can knock holes in the wall if you want to and do all sorts of very radical things – if the gallery you're in allows you! There's much more freedom. But here in the British Museum, in an encyclopaedic museum full of very precious objects, you can't do that. Each object has value. You're more restricted – and that's okay.

I've been working alongside my partner and studio curator Indra Khanna. Every time we came to these visits, we would leave the building afterwards, going, 'Wasn't that great? Wasn't that amazing?' We would see all this extraordinary stuff and then sit down and have a cup of tea afterwards to decompress and go, 'Wow, so can we get that one in?' It's been quite a journey.

Book your ticket now and join renowned Guyanese-British artist Hew Locke as he turns his lens on the British Museum collection in a collaborative exhibition exploring histories of British imperial power.

A special book accompanies the show. 

Supported by 
Cockayne – Grants for the Arts: a donor advised fund held at The London Community Foundation