The colonial project would have gone nowhere without the ship. Whether as a lone vessel or a processional flotilla, a watercraft as symbol distills the thirst for conquest as efficiently as it embodies the extractive and dehumanizing violence both onboard and ashore. Ships have been a leitmotif of Hew Locke’s for decades. The artist, born in Edinburgh, raised partly in Guyana, and now based in London, has spent his career excavating, confronting, and reframing the aesthetic and sociopolitical collateral of imperialism, with projects ranging from a series of mixed-media portraits of Elizabeth II to a public intervention of 12 bronze chairs installed at the birthplace of the Magna Carta to mark the document’s 800th anniversary.
This month, the Yale Center for British Art opens the most comprehensive exhibition of Locke’s work to date, spanning nearly 50 works and three decades. Central to “Passages,” which will travel to the Wexner Center for the Arts in Ohio and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston next year, is a site-specific installation of his ship sculptures, three of which are suspended from the foyer of the YCBA’s legendary Louis I. Kahn building.
To mark the exhibition’s opening, we asked the artist to take us back to where his elaborate works begin: his London studio.
A site-specific installation of your signature ships is a locus of “Passages.” What does Louis Kahn’s architecture bring out of the installation, and what does the work surface in the architecture?
The building is an elegant modernist jewelry box. Maybe it makes my ships look more jewel-like.
What’s a work you re-encountered during the making of the show that struck you differently then when you first crafted it?
There are works in the show that I had not seen for decades, for example, the charcoal drawings from the 1990s. I can’t say any of my older works struck me differently—it was just good to be reassured that the pieces I thought were strong at the time I made them are still strong now.
Your practice has occupied itself with excavating the symbolism of imperialism. How does it feel to be showing this work in the United States?
The history of colonial and imperialist Britain is tied up intimately with the history of the U.S., so I feel the work in this show is of direct relevance to Americans. We have a shared history. It always feels good to me to be showing in the U.S., a place I am very attached to, where all my immediate family live, and that I visit often.
What do you want for yourself, and your practice, next?
Progress and excitement. I’m trying out making some small bronzes for the first time, as well as a large series of limited edition prints. I want to do some more traveling for inspiration: I’m planning to go back to Guyana next year to take more photos for work, documenting the vernacular wooden architecture. I want what every artist wants—success—giving me the financial security and the freedom to completely make what I want.
What’s the first thing you do when you enter your studio?
This is a very important time in the studio. I can walk into the room and for the first 30 seconds, I am able to see my previous day’s work freshly and clearly. This insight guides what I do for the rest of the day.
What’s on your studio playlist?
The BBC podcast The Rest is History by Tim Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, which takes a fresh look at a different historical topic every episode. I don’t listen to music so much these days, more often audiobooks—thrillers set in foreign lands. It’s like taking a cheap holiday.
If you could have a studio visit with one artist, dead or alive, who would it be?
My father, the late Donald Locke.
What’s the weirdest tool you can’t live without?
A homemade wooden rig we set up to bend thin sheets of metal into miniature corrugated roofing for my boat and house sculptures.
Do you work with any assistants or alone?
I work with a small team of trusted assistants, some of whom have worked with me off-and-on for 15 years. They are not there every day, because I need time alone in the studio too.
Who’s the first person you show something to?
My studio assistants. I’m always very interested to hear their opinions. Especially because they’re younger than me. Their life experiences are different and they interpret things in the work in a different way to me, which helps me see the work in a fresh light.
If you splurge on materials, what are your must-haves, and where do you get them?
Fabrics: trimmings from specialist shops in Soho, and custom printed fabrics depicting my own works, from a mill in the north. Also, artists quality marker pens.
Have you ever destroyed a work to make something new?
Not destroyed, but I do incorporate old things into new things. For example, in 1997 I made a colorful papier-mâché figure, which got wrapped up to make a new piece of work called “Merchandise” in 2000. And this later got wrapped up into a work called “Hemmed in Two,” which is now in the collection of the Pérez Art Museum Miami. I have also been making a new series of works called “Raw Materials,” which include images of my past works in them. I’m mining my back catalogue to create something completely new, something my father also did.
What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever done in your studio?
In 2007, I did a series of photographs called “How Do You Want Me?”—in which I created backdrops, props, and costumes for a series of dangerous exotic characters—which I then wore and inhabited. It was exhausting embodying these personalities in their heavy costumes under the hot studio lights, with only my eyes and hands showing to indicate I was engulfed.
What book changed the way you think about art?
Ways of Seeing by John Berger. I read this way back in the ’80s at college. It changed the way I looked at art—it was my first inkling of feminist art. It also made me more aware of how art is viewed as an image and how people may know a piece of work more by a reproduction than from ever viewing the real object. It started me thinking about how art is collected.