Hew Locke: Ships, Monuments and the Afterlives of Empire

Hew Locke makes sculpture that asks us to look again at ships, royal portraits, trophies and public monuments. Born in Edinburgh and raised partly in Guyana, he has developed an artistic language of ornament and unsettling historical detail. His installations are often spectacular, but their deeper concern is how power survives through objects and the stories told about them.

From Edinburgh to Guyana and back

Hew Locke was born in Edinburgh in 1959 and spent much of his childhood in Guyana, where his parents were both artists. That environment exposed him to the everyday visual presence of colonial legacies, including the continued circulation of royal images after Guyana became independent in 1966. He later returned to Britain and trained in art, eventually studying sculpture at the Royal College of Art. The journey through different social and political settings helped shape a sustained curiosity about official signs of power. A crown, a coat of arms or a public statue could mean different things depending on who was looking at it and where it stood. ^[1]

Locke's experience should not be reduced to a neat contrast between British and Guyanese identity. Guyana itself has histories involving Indigenous peoples, African enslavement, Indian indenture, colonial government and independence, while Britain is no less shaped by migration and empire. His work explores the circulation of images across these histories. The result is a practice in which an apparently familiar European object might carry unfamiliar decoration, or an object associated with trade might seem both beautiful and threatening. Rather than provide simple verdicts on the past, Locke makes the inherited symbols difficult to look at casually. ^[2]

Royal symbols that no longer sit still

The image of royalty has occupied Locke for many years. In series devoted to royal heads and the symbols of monarchy, he surrounds recognisable portraits with layers of beads, artificial materials, glittering surfaces or decorative forms. The transformation is often elaborate enough to look ceremonial, but the exaggeration also prompts doubt. What does such an image promise? Who once had the power to put it on coins, stamps and school books? Why can a face circulate across the world long after a political relationship has changed? Locke's sculptures and reliefs approach these questions through the visual vocabulary of monarchy itself. ^[3]

His work Sovereign State extends that enquiry into moving image. A depiction of Elizabeth II shifts and transforms rather than remain the reassuring, fixed icon associated with official portraiture. The artist's memory of royal images appearing on Guyanese exercise books after independence informs the work. The figure of the monarch becomes a way to explore the persistence of political signs when institutions and allegiances change. It would be too simple to call the result a rejection of all royal imagery. More precisely, Locke tests how those images acquire authority and what happens when an artist makes them unstable. ^[4]

Ships as carriers of many histories

Boats are another recurring form. Locke has used vessels to suggest movement, commerce, migration, warfare and loss, sometimes all within one installation. A ship can carry people seeking opportunity, people forced into movement, soldiers, goods or stories. It can be a symbol of survival and a tool of conquest. This ambiguity gives boat sculptures their power. They do not have to reproduce one historical journey to invite consideration of the many voyages through which modern countries were shaped. Their physical forms are compelling: hulls, rigging, sails and suspended structures make the history of movement almost tangible. ^[5]

In For Those in Peril on the Sea, created for a commission associated with Folkestone and later shown in other settings, an assembly of model boats hangs overhead. The ships differ in shape and origin, suggesting that the histories of sea travel cannot be represented by one navy or one nationality. The work's title recalls a hymn associated with mariners and the dangers of the sea. Yet the installation's meaning stretches beyond individual heroism. It asks viewers to consider people who may be absent from conventional memorials, as well as journeys whose passengers remain unnamed. No crew is visible; the vessels themselves become a way to remember those who travelled within them. ^[6]

Changing the meaning of a monument

Locke's Restoration series, begun in the mid-2000s, reworked photographs of public statues in Bristol. By attaching materials to their surfaces, he disrupted both the official monument and the photograph's claim to provide a neutral record of it. One of the figures he considered was Edward Colston, the slave trader whose statue was pulled down during protests in 2020. The earlier date of Locke's work matters. Arguments about the place of such monuments did not suddenly begin in one summer; artists, historians and campaigners had questioned them for many years. His photographs invite scrutiny of who is placed on a pedestal and whose actions are hidden by the elegance of a public image. ^[7]

The technique also exposes a paradox. Monumental sculpture is intended to look permanent, yet its meaning shifts as societies learn more about the people it celebrates. A photograph seems to preserve a single moment, but Locke's additions make that apparently fixed representation change. The point is not that every statue should receive an identical response. It is that public memory involves choices, and those choices need to remain open to examination. By physically ornamenting and interrupting familiar images, the artist encourages viewers to ask questions that often disappear beneath routines of passing a monument without noticing it. ^[8]

Locke’s temporary Foreign Exchange commission shows what this approach can look like outside a museum. During the Birmingham 2022 Festival, a sculptural boat surrounded the existing statue of Queen Victoria in Victoria Square. Five smaller Victorias appeared in the vessel, wearing helmets and carrying replicas of medals linked to imperial military campaigns. The work was commissioned by Ikon and built around a monument that residents already knew. Instead of treating the bronze as a silent piece of urban furniture, Locke supplied a new frame that made the imperial associations of its subject harder to overlook. Because the work was temporary, it also raised questions about how cities debate permanent memorials. ^[17]

Twelve chairs and an unfinished discussion

The permanent work The Jurors was unveiled at Runnymede in 2015 to mark the eight-hundredth anniversary of Magna Carta. It comprises twelve decorated bronze chairs arranged so that people can sit, face one another and discuss questions about law, freedom and justice. Their surfaces include imagery drawn from different struggles for rights. The work resists the idea that a monument must tell visitors what to think from a distance. Its physical invitation to sit makes the audience part of its completion. The historical place becomes a setting for discussion rather than a site where constitutional history is treated as finished. ^[9]

Commissioned through a partnership involving Surrey County Council and the National Trust, the project also required collaboration beyond the studio. The commissioning organisation Situations helped produce it, while poet Owen Sheers contributed a work to its public launch. Such details reveal the social process behind public art. The sculpture is not only the product of a single maker's intention but of practical cooperation, craftsmanship and public use. The bronze chairs retain their own artistic character even when nobody sits in them. When a visitor does sit down, the meaning changes: freedom and rights become subjects people are invited to discuss with one another. ^[10]

The Procession and the weight of display

For Tate Britain's Duveen Galleries, Locke created The Procession, installed in 2022. The work brought an extended gathering of costumed figures into a museum space associated with formal and often heroic displays of art. The figures carry banners, objects and signs whose references move between celebrations, mourning, protest and historical ceremony. Their variety resists an easy claim that the entire gathering represents one community or political demand. A procession can mark triumph, loss, solidarity or the exercise of authority. By placing such a crowd inside a prestigious institution, Locke changes the relationship between the visitor and the museum's usual presentation of national culture. ^[11]

The installation's scale and materials were essential. Fabric, cardboard, paint and assembled objects contributed to figures that seemed individual despite forming a collective. One could read fragments of histories in a costume or an emblem without being able to resolve the whole procession into a single narrative. It is important not to mistake this complexity for incoherence. A procession in the street also brings together different people, signs and feelings that make more sense through movement than through a list of explanations. The work made a normally composed museum hall feel crowded with untidy histories, as though the people outside established collections had entered the room on their own terms. ^[12]

Gilt and the visual language of conquest

In 2022, Locke's Gilt occupied the façade niches of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The sculptures evoke elaborate trophies whose gilded surfaces suggest wealth, prestige and conquest. Some appear damaged or incomplete. Their references to objects in the museum collection encourage viewers to think about how treasures travel, how they are displayed and what forms of power are hidden beneath ornamental beauty. The title holds the sound of both gold and guilt without forcing the work into a single conclusion about any one object. ^[13]

A museum façade is a telling site for this work because it represents an institution's public face. Visitors approaching the building encounter forms that resemble decorative signs of victory but may also seem broken or unstable. The sculptures open questions about collection histories before viewers reach the galleries inside. That gesture does not solve the difficult work of provenance research, restitution or interpretation. It makes those concerns visible at an architectural scale, reminding audiences that museums are historical actors, not neutral storehouses outside politics. Locke's use of spectacle helps bring an unfamiliar debate into everyday attention without making its answers appear simple. ^[14]

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Gilt took a different approach to the same visual problem. Installed on the museum’s exterior in 2022, four elaborate trophy-like sculptures borrowed decorative details from objects in its collection. They played on the proximity of the words gilt and guilt: what looks like a celebratory prize may also direct attention to how wealth, art and power change hands. The commission placed these questions on a prestigious building rather than confining them to an exhibition text. It showed a further use for Locke’s crowded visual language, where splendour attracts the viewer and its historical implications emerge through prolonged looking. ^[18]

Asking what a museum holds

The British Museum's 2024–25 exhibition Hew Locke: What Have We Here? explored how collections tell stories about British power and connections with other places. It was developed through close attention to objects, their histories and the language surrounding them. Locke worked alongside curators, including Isabel Seligman, and with his longstanding collaborator Indra Khanna. Naming those contributions matters because interpretation in a museum is a collective activity. Researchers, conservators, designers and others help make encounters with collections possible. The exhibition asked visitors to consider not only what a museum contains but what kinds of explanation have traditionally accompanied those holdings. ^[15]

The questions raised across Locke's career are not limited to whether an old object should remain in a particular building. A ship, statue or trophy can carry histories of creativity as well as exploitation. A museum can preserve evidence while also requiring a more honest account of how that evidence arrived. Locke's artistic strength is to keep those tensions available rather than smoothing them away. His works can be dazzling and disturbing at the same time, because historical beauty and unequal power are often intertwined. By placing the symbols of authority under imaginative pressure, he makes room for audiences to look at familiar institutions and ask whose experiences have been left outside their most confident stories. ^[16]

Sources

1. https://www.britishmuseum.org/about-us/press/press-releases/announcing-co-curated-exhibition-hew-locke-what-have-we-here
2. https://newsroom.gy/2022/06/17/artist-hew-locke-draws-inspiration-from-guyana/
3. https://hewlocke.net/artwork/house-of-windsor-reliefs/
4. https://hewlocke.net/artwork/sovereign-state/
5. https://www.icaboston.org/exhibitions/hew-locke-the-procession/
6. https://hewlocke.net/artwork/for-those-in-peril-on-the-sea/
7. https://hewlocke.net/artwork/restoration/
8. https://www.britishmuseum.org/blog/hew-locke-living-history
9. https://hewlocke.net/artwork/the-jurors/
10. https://www.situations.org.uk/projects/magna-carta/
11. https://hewlocke.net/artwork/the-procession/
12. https://shop.tate.org.uk/hew-locke-the-procession-large-postcard/27385.html
13. https://hewlocke.net/artwork/gilt/
14. https://www.timeout.com/newyork/art/the-facade-commission-hew-locke-gilt
15. https://hewlocke.net/artwork/what/
16. https://www.britishmuseum.org/exhibitions/hew-locke-what-have-we-here
17. https://hewlocke.net/artwork/foreign-exchange/
18. https://www.metmuseum.org/perspectives/artist-interview-hew-locke-gilt