Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou explores Hew Locke: Passages, tracing the artist’s sustained engagement with movement, memory and the passage of time.
The boats appear weightless, brightly coloured bodies of air, hulls the stuff that dreams are made of. Suspended from various ceilings – an English church, a German town-hall, galleries and private collections the world over – this fantastical flotilla, silent, still, yet cresting the waves of waterless atmospheres, paradoxically flies through these spaces, leaving in its wake invisible ripples of stories, rings of feeling, the soft swell of former lands and unforgotten shores.
Boats, both actual and sculptural, sail across the sun-dappled seas of Hew Locke’s decades-long career. Beautiful sculptures – crafted with the utmost care and respect, held high in appreciation for what these portable structures mean for man and child alike – drift and float (though rarely ever drop anchor) again and again throughout his oeuvre. One of Locke’s earliest encounters with a boat would have been as a young child, when his parents left Edinburgh for Guyana in the late 60s. His is a memory rolling through the waves of an era when most travel occurred by boat – though he recalls how stowaways were treated with the same contempt that refugees are today. Guyana, too, is, as Locke fondly observes, an island of waterways, where travelling by some kind of vessel is essential to navigating the country and moving from one place or home to another. But the artist’s first transformative encounter with boats occurred in Cornwall, during his time at Falmouth School of Art in the 80s. On returning from a sailing trip in Falmouth, Locke “couldn’t get the boat out of [his] head”. Suddenly his journeys on ships from Guyana to England and vice versa, as well as the continual presence of the sea and sailing in his paternal homeland, clicked into place. Memories of one re-emerged in the other, only for the motif of the boat to glide into the harbour of his imagination.
At the entrance to Locke’s latest survey exhibition, Passages, at the Yale Centre for British Art (YCBA), these trans-Atlantic encounters with boats greet the viewer. Uniting the domestic architecture of Guyana – particularly buildings constructed of timber and propped up on wooden stilts – and the types of trawler known to both Cornish and Guyanese sailors, Locke’s nautical sculptures become cross-cultural symbols, carriers of national and international histories, cosmic constructions that complicate the distinction between earth and water, the home and the vehicle, the static and the fugitive, the landed and the landless. Free of figures, though haunted by the remnants of human and alien alike, Locke’s trawlers move into our midst – or us into theirs – eerily, elegiacally, embodying the expectations and sorrows, aspirations and fears of past and future peoples, ancient and unfounded worlds. Like many of his sculptures, from his remarkable early works like Hemmed In (1999) through to his renowned Ambassador series (2019), his celestial fleets, whether made up of trawlers, canoes, ships or paddle boats, simultaneously comment on socio-political histories whilst literally being above both. Passing through, the boats at the entrance of the Yale Centre for British Art, create their own temporality whilst interacting with and creating waves in ours.
The latest fleet, The Survivor, The Relic and Desire (2022), encountered before entering the main gallery, hover before us, swaying to an unheard song, to a tidal tune all of their own. A meter or so above the floor, they hang at eye level – unlike Locke’s former work, For Those in Peril on the Sea (2013), where a grand flotilla of seventy vessels was hung from a church roof in Folkestone, their variegated keels glowing in the darkened aisles. What is special about The Survivor, The Relic and Desire, nonetheless, is not so much that we come face to face with these magical structures; nor is it the evident care invested in each meticulously designed maritime miniature, with their symbolically printed sails and cascade of foliage, string, flags and jute bagged cargo. No, what is particularly striking and stirring about these boats is that they signify what we are about to encounter; they announce the expertise, artistic sophistication and sophisticated language which mark Locke’s practice.
This small yet bold convoy encapsulates the ‘journey’ of his dazzling decades-long career – “everything,” Locke says to me over Zoom, “comes back to the boats.” And it is the boats that encompass some of the most important themes and issues explored: colonial exploitation through naval enterprise (particularly when it comes to British imperialism), migration and climate catastrophe, capitalism and global consumption, as well as the myths, imaginaries and poetries that assemble and accrue around a particular motif. With this latest exhibition, however, the clue is in the evocative title, Passages. True to the abundance often found in and associated with his work, Locke chose a noun in its plural form and one ever redolent of his sea-faring sculptures. In the Oxford English Dictionary, the singular noun ‘passage’ not only means the ‘action of going or moving onward, across, or past; movement from one place to another’ but, in its Middle English definition it is ‘the actual boat or ship’ which conveys one over water. The boat itself is not only a means to an end, but a thing through which to conceptually pass through, pass into, as well as pass across. It is a transitional object in multiple senses.
Locke arrived at the title “through lots of agonising” after “disposing of some” names and realising “this one worked.” Keeping a “folder a couple of inches thick and full of titles,” the artist explains how names and titular phrases always hold importance for him, and more so when employed for a significant exposition and monograph. For Locke, the title Passages translates as “a journey through life, a journey from one spot to another”, a journey which took him from the UK to Guyana and back again, but also beyond both countries to international institutions and acclaim. “Passage is one thing, passages is more elusive,” he muses to me during our conversation, as if to acknowledge the manifest ways through which a viewer may come to his art, especially his boats. A master of complicating and disrupting accepted notions or monolithic impressions of images, logos, emblems and iconography, this pluralisation of the noun again asks us to reconsider our ‘way’ to and through his work. In this title he gifts us multiples points of approach and access (the latter of which is another definition of the word); he grants us passage – “passage also means your ticket on a boat,” Locke thoughtfully points out to me – to new views and vistas.
There is another obsolete meaning that strikes me as pertinent for the artist’s methodology. Passage once meant ‘the extension of a line, string, etc., from one point to another,’ and this is exactly how Locke uses materials, whether they be charcoal or beads, colour pencils or ribbons and lace. There is a continuous sense of a weaving, moving, energised and energy-inducing line being extended from one part of an entity to another; and ‘extension’, as the definition states, is exactly what we see in his early works Hemmed In and Hemmed In Two (2000), where strips of cardboard are deftly interwoven and latticed across the body of an inner boat-like composition partly made of the same material. Looking at photographs of both versions of the work, it is hard to see where one line (often accented with white acrylic paint) begins and the other ends. Our eye becomes entangled in these carefully thought out and crafted forms, so that we, too, become hemmed into the work when attempting to deconstruct and reconstruct it together. That there appears to be a boat-like-form enmeshed and entrapped within, embellished with the ironically used cardboard linear wrapping, is, perhaps, part of the paradox of this impressively huge yet claustrophobically dense sculpture. Immobile and moored in the Victoria & Albert Museum, Hemmed in Two (2000) acts as a commentary on a collection that is largely the spoils of empire. Marked with the term ‘Export’, Locke alludes to earlier critical assumptions of his work as ‘foreign produce’, associated with elsewhere, rather than the artistic output of a British Guyanese artist whose rightful place was in British institutions as well as those beyond this isle. The literal extended line of process and material here, then, becomes metaphorical, the emotional and intellectual tethering that is projected and freighted onto an artist whose work had every right to be seen as British.
Yet this line, this passage of a process, is also apparent in his fantastical charcoal drawings and early plastic sculptures. After having his vibrant sculptures ‘mischaracterised as folk art’, Locke stopped using colour and only worked in charcoal and black and white pastels for three years. Whether this was in protest or a strategy to reassert his artistry, the drawings are brilliant in and of themselves, and demonstrate a mastery of line and pattern that is carried through to his later works. Like Hemmed In and Hemmed In Two, Locke’s drawings appear wonderfully encumbered by the enveloping and roving line of their attire. The ‘passage’ of the line does not so much as obscure as bring about and embolden the being of these mysterious and mythical creatures (we espy human hands but also feline heads). In Infanta 2 (1997-8) and Infanta 3 (1997), the female figures armoured in highly patinated seventeenth-century dress approximate sculpture in their monochrome solidity, their stiff yet fulsome materiality, their spatial fixity and monumentality. They retain the uncanny attitude that some statues assume because of this living line which sees mimicry and masquerade render familiar manners and styles unfamiliar again, the strange estranged further through flashing eyes and twitching noses behind masses of lace, crepe and silk. Subversive from start to finish – in some drawings Locke lifts the positions and stances found in the work of Hogarth, Manet and Velázquez adding an additional critical and art historical layer to these elaborate forms – the infantas possess you as much as they seem possessed; they regard you through their disguise of decorative masks and draped dress, all the while impressing their (animal) prowess and power upon the viewer. Still, it is hard to determine where Locke’s line starts and finishes, where the sartorial state of these personas meets the surface of skin. This journey of line, therefore, deliberately obstructs as much as it ostensibly overcomes the critical and institutional misinterpretation of the artist’s work.
Locke’s return to colour and sculpture did not, however, break with this type of ‘passage’. His equally mischievous yet joy-inducing Menace series (1999) saw him use objects “like slabs of paint” and the extension of line woven around and across amorphous bodies with synthetic feathers, vines, beads, tassels and plastic paraphernalia. Echoing the decorative excess of the charcoal drawings, these ludic sculptures frustrate singular readings and withhold the constituting structure of these flamboyant forms. What is interesting about this suite of work, which plays with ideas of the carnivalesque and challenges the colonial gaze, is that Locke almost didn’t make them. Embarrassed to pursue the creation of these assemblages, but very much wanting to pursue the ‘urge’ to do so, Locke’s contemporary, the artist Frances Richardson, with whom he shared a studio at Gasworks, encouraged him to make the work. For Locke, Gasworks quite simply nurtured him: “it was a kind of international art university, since the art world as we know it today didn’t exist. But it had a profound impact on me.” Not only did Gasworks foster multiple conversations with the likes of now revered British artists Richardson and Joy Gregory, but its inclusive and inspiring atmosphere was shared and shaped by “many artists from all over the world.” That this rich, open and multicultural environment of exchange enabled Locke to make his plastic sculptures is no surprise then. Giving himself permission to follow his instincts – one could say, the line and channel of his own creative sensibility – these first plastic sculptures were born.
Though Locke no longer works with plastic, the importance of these initial sculptures cannot be overstated. In their cornucopia of floral, leafy, feathered opulence the watchful eyes of other objects stare out, the barrel of a toy gun is espied and the seemingly dismembered limbs of buried dolls poke through their downy, petal-strewn exoskeletons. Hidden in the soft sprawl of multimedia, the hardened menace – whether that be the original idea or our preconceptions of who or what that actually is – lurks, a gremlin waiting to disrupt our re-making of the machine. What was also nestled within these sculptures were future ones: the incendiary seeds for The Queen’s Coat of Arms (2004) or the life-size self-portraits that form How Do You Want Me? (2007), from which the monograph takes its cover. The Menace series, therefore, hid within its irreverent exterior a plethora of artworks each more generative, generously applied and genius than the ones from which they came.
That Locke begins to use his own body in these later works, nevertheless, does not stem the flow of this earlier magic. Entombing himself within these near sarcophagi-like sculptural encasings, where only his eyes are visible, Locke confronts the viewer, not just with the sensory and sensuous overload of the entire artwork, but with the simultaneous disappearance and reappearance of the body, his body, in the frame. In Serpent of the Nile (Sejant), the total objectification with which the body is subject becomes a process of transformation, transfiguration even, where Locke the artist, now shrouded, mummified, glorified in the disposable detritus of our consumer culture, rebodies himself as a kind of king, a god, a monument, as well as the votive shrine itself. Extended with cloth backdrops and emblems of British monarchic power, this image takes on new levels of critical grandeur, complicating our sense of who and what is being celebrated or reviled. Literally hemming himself in with what I would argue is the exoticisation and othering experienced by artists of the Caribbean diaspora at the time, Locke gestures to the feelings behind his earlier sculptural works, Hemmed In and Hemmed In Two, whilst looking forward to a new kind of paradoxical and parodic aesthetic, one where the decorative, where the excessive, where the polychromatic can be playfully and powerfully used against these reductive viewpoints and expectations.
How Do You Want Me? created an evident passage through which Locke could move to process then express his anger at the limitations and prejudices placed on him. It also initiates a pronounced investigation into the politics of space and bodies; of who gets to occupy it and how one towering figure embodies one ideology or history over another. Describing himself as an “ambivalent observer” of systems and institutions of power, of the longstanding monarchy and rising republican sentiment in the UK, Locke observes the dangers and pitfalls of having a British president, of having another man glorified into a type of king, as has been seen with other political leaders around the world. And the question of who is raised up, quite literally, to positions of power or pedestals of prestige, recurs again and again in his work. Drawing over or decorating photographs of British monuments, statues and busts – Edward Colston, Edmund Burke, Queen Victoria, Horatio Nelson and the like – he draws our attention to the key players of political power and the violent histories hidden within these seemingly irreproachable figures. With swirling acrylic or metallic media, the supposedly infallible faces and forms of these British statesmen and women, start to crumble and fall, and the submerged stories of other nations, cultures and peoples start to emerge and creep into view.
There is a haunting quality to much of Locke’s work, as if the past keeps no peace with the present – and won’t allow it any either. Though his materials and processes complicate neat observations of his work, they always allow for some kind of exhumation of repressed feelings and thoughts, experiences and events. Placing a fretwork of gold across a sculpture of a pilgrim (as seen in Pilgrim Central Park, 2018), at once brings about connotations of colonial wealth and the plunder of indigenous nations. But it also submerges the body of a hegemonic figure to make way for the re-emergence of a marginalised, erased one. Objects are never just one thing or one-sided, Locke implies, much like the political apparatus and narratives that frame European and British history. See doubly, see more, I feel Locke implores; let the multiplicity and complexity of life come to the fore.
From this examination of state symbolism and monuments, alternative bodies have marched forth, pursuing their quest, their rightful passage across land and time, institutional spaces and walls too. This is most evident in the breath-taking installation, The Procession (2022), which saw even Locke lost for words (“Oh boy! This is good,” Locke said to himself at his first viewing). Made up of almost 150 distinct, life-size figures, literally proceeding through Tate Britain’s central Duveen galleries, The Procession saw a hybrid medley of personas and personalities, creatures and corporeal characters moving together, freely, individually, yet as one, in the most prestigious art spaces across the country. With no known destination, the troupe, who are entirely their own group but also bare some resemblance to carnival dwellers, a royal entourage on a progress, political protestors or funeral parishioners, walk forward, occupying the space, altering its function and scope, creating their own way as they proceed into the future. Deeply moving in its encompassing of every possible form and stage of life (pregnant female figures, small child-like masked ones), The Procession sees all of Locke’s interest and skills, mediums and methods, striding into our midst, making present what was once absent from the artistic and socio-political arenas shown and known. There is pride and courage in this congregation, from their vivid attire to their brandishing of flags, banners and mementoes. What moves and impresses us equally is, however, the sense that they will keep walking, they will keep boldly baring their signs and standards, and they will keep presenting themselves to us no matter what attempts to block their track or impede their march. Like Locke’s sublime sculptures, the near-apocalyptic riders, that make up the Ambassadors series (2021-22), the exquisitely conceived and crafted characters in The Procession, are galactic travellers, trans-historical movers and shakers, who are trekking across diverse temporalities as well as temperatures. They are precious yet precarious bodies of knowledge that glean and gain more as they cross, as they pass through, as they transition between cultures, epochs and ages. Homeless, they march on, confronting us with our stasis, our inability to welcome and home “outsiders”, our unwillingness to see that they, we, are all simply passing through, making passage or trying to find the right passages, as Locke rightly asserts, during our short time on earth. The boats glide on, the people riot and storm, monuments are toppled or re-installed, but our desire, Locke’s desire, to trace the lines, extend them from one point in time to another, continues.
Hew Locke: Passages will be shown at the Yale Centre for British Art until 11th January 2026.
The new monograph, Hew Locke: Passages, co-edited by Martina Droth and Allie Biswas, is published by Yale Centre for British Art and the Yale University Press, and is available to purchase now.