Who is Hew Locke?

'I go to the British Museum to think.'  

Hew Locke is a renowned Guyanese-British contemporary artist, winner of a Paul Hamlyn Award and an East International Award in 2000 and appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his services to art in 2023. He has been coming to the British Museum for over 40 years. As a student at Falmouth Art School in the 1980s he became intimately familiar with the ethnographic collections, then housed at the Museum of Mankind, a separate site in Piccadilly, where he would often spend a whole day drawing a single object. He developed a close eye for detail and appreciation of the significance of objects from cultures across the world. However, his fascination with objects and the stories they tell – the life of an object, its materiality, where it came from and how it has travelled – was already formed before he ever interacted with the British Museum collection.

Born in Edinburgh, in 1966 Locke travelled by boat to Guyana when he was five years old. This was just in time to see the country gain independence from Britain. Though colonised by the British in 1831, the Dutch had also established colonies in Guyana throughout the 16th and 17th centuries. This experience, he says, gave him a profound interest in national identities: 'I saw the flag being raised, the anthem being written… I saw a nation being born.' A statue of Queen Victoria situated in front of Georgetown's central law courts, which had had its head and hand blown off in an act of anti-colonial protest, was moved to the Botanical Gardens after Independence; 'behind God's back', as Locke recalls. This memory was to have a profound influence on Locke's fascination with symbolic objects.

His childhood in Guyana, surrounded by an artistic family including his father, the sculptor Donald Locke, and his mother, the painter Leila Locke (neé Chaplin), influenced his work and style. He later studied at Falmouth School of Art and the Royal College of Art. Locke's eclectic approach, collaging and layering different motifs and inspirations, reflects the varied influences found in the Caribbean and in Britain. Boats, for example, inspired by those that first brought him to Guyana, and back to the UK, have long formed a part of Locke's artistic language. The large-scale installation Hemmed in Two, a 12-metre-long boat made from cardboard and found materials, appeared as if lodged between four columns at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2000.

Every couple of years, Locke says, he feels a compulsion to make another boat. He covers models of galleons, barques, coastguard ships and dinghies with religious iconography, embroidered figures and memento mori (reminders of death). In Armada (2017–19), which was on show at the Royal Academy's exhibition Entangled Pasts earlier this year, a whole flotilla of boats gently dangled from wires. They recall votive boats found in fishermen's churches, which were typically hung from the ceiling to give thanks for surviving a life at sea. By covering his boats in symbols both sacred (such as ancient artefacts and masks of revered monarchs) and profane (such as skulls and mercenaries) he weaves past and present together to explore issues of migration and identity, among others. In Locke's words, 'yesterday's refugee might be today's citizen'.

Another subject that has continued to fascinate Locke is the iconography of sovereignty and governance. In 2004 he covered the façade of Tate Britain – to which he would return triumphantly, years later – with King Creole, a piratical take on the House of Commons coat-of-arms as a skull covered in fake flowers. Monarchs such as Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth II regularly feature in busts, drawings and embellished photographs, such as the new Souvenir 20 (Queen Victoria) (2024), created especially for Locke's exhibition at the British Museum. Locke has covered the antique bust, a Parian ware souvenir such as those created to commemorate the Great Exhibition of 1851, with densely layered ornamentation, foliage, medals and gold chains. 

From far away, the bust's decorated surface gleams like a precious gem; come up close and you will see that instead of gold and silver, it features plastic and brass, with snakes running through Victoria's hair – including tresses bought in a hair shop in Brixton – recalling the classical myth of Medusa. The tiny replicas of medals on her bust refer to wars waged in Africa, all conflicts fought in her name. Her figure is both adorned and weighed down by history.

In 2022, in the wake of the Covid pandemic, Locke was commissioned to fill the Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain, and produced The Procession, a swirling congregation of carnivalesque characters, whose costumes contained references to histories of empire, trade and power, particularly examining the history of sugar production in the Caribbean. Their clothing was covered in historical objects including Great Seals of the Kings of England, the Barbados Penny and images of Benin Portuguese mercenaries, such as those found in the British Museum collection. 

Locke's interest in how nations shape themselves also extends to the way objects become instrumentalised in this process of nation-building. In 2022, Locke worked with the Metropolitan Museum of Art on a commission for their facade, Gilt, which incorporated images of objects from the museum collection, drawing attention to their collecting histories, also a central theme of the current exhibition.  

Locke often says that if he hadn't been an artist, he would have been a historian. His artworks refer to historical objects of great cultural significance, as well as varied artefacts like medals and seals. Placing his work in the middle of the material history that has for so long fed his artistic practice brings the histories represented in his art to life. Locke also examines his own position within imperial history: elected a member of the Royal Academy of Arts in 2022, and presented with an OBE (Order of the British Empire) in 2023, he is keen to discuss his own entanglements with the system he has spent his career critiquing – even bringing his own medals into the exhibition.

In order to curate Hew Locke: what have we here? Locke and his partner Indra Khanna have been visiting the Museum for the past two years, to examine the collections more deeply. As curators, we have also been encouraged to see objects differently. Objects often displayed with a 'straightforward' history are complicated by viewing them from a different perspective. Each of us brings our own experience and intuition to the way we interpret them. The Barbados Penny, for example, is a fascinating yet at first glance inconspicuous object. You can hear Locke discuss the penny in a video with Curator and Keeper of Money and Medals Tom Hockenhull, or read more about it in the exhibition's introductory blog.

Another surprising find were trade beads, made in Venice and Bohemia in the nineteenth century, which were commonly traded for enslaved African people. Trade beads have long featured in Locke's work, for example adorning the figure of Edward Colston in his 2006 series Restoration. Colston was a director of the Royal African Company, an English company which trafficked more African people across the Atlantic than any other institution in the history of the Transatlantic trade in enslaved people. While familiar with these kinds of beads, finding a series in the stores mounted on cards with inscriptions for different commodities including palm oil, gold and enslaved people, highlighted for Locke the status of these people as 'goods' to be bought or sold.

This might be why Locke's commentary in the exhibition already resonates with so many people: by bringing his own voice to the narrative, he encourages others to do so as well. Lesser-known stories are brought out. In Locke's words: 

'This project has enabled me to engage with the collections in a much deeper way than ever before, and in a way few artists have had the privilege of doing. I have always been interested in the way objects are interpreted through display in museums. What story has been chosen and is being told or implied about the past? How does it relate to the present? How can this telling be questioned, disrupted, or complicated? These are the questions I am tackling through this project.'

Bringing together well-known objects, as well as new discoveries shared by Museum curators, Locke hopes to tell new stories, often found in the most unexpected places.

Hew Locke: what have we here? is open until 9 February 2025.

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