Post-colonial Trade
The textile print on the front of this figure's dress reproduces one of the artist's works from his Share series.
Since 2009, Locke has collected and carefully reworked and painted over original share certificates for defunct companies. This particular share was for the West India Improvement Company. Based in Jamaica, it was formed in 1889 in New York to acquire and develop the Jamaica Railway and large areas of land on the island. Locke decorated the certificate with a bunch of bananas and, peeping out from behind it, the hands and head of the wooden figure of a bird-man spirit carved by the Taíno – Arawak people indigenous to the Caribbean. This is one of two Taíno sculptures in the collection of the British Museum. These pre-colonial carvings were discovered in Jamaica in 1792 and brought to the UK as part of a collection assembled by the nineteenth-century British art dealer William Ockleford Oldman. The Jamaican government has expressed its strong desire for their repatriation.
Another image is of the Fraser plantation house in Guyana, known locally as the 'House of a Thousand Windows'. Since childhood, Locke has admired these wooden buildings, part of a decaying, disappearing heritage...
The influence of both Indian and Indo-Caribbean culture can be seen in The Procession, as in much of Locke’s work to date. It is unclear whether the procession participants are wearing masks or if these are their true faces. Several figures and costumes within The Procession reference specific Caribbean Carnival characters from across the region. These include Mother Sally in her voluminous dress, Midnight Robber, wearing a huge, brimmed hat, Pitchy Patchy, dressed in a suit made of tattered, colourful pieces of cloth, and Sailor Mas, inspired by British, French and American naval staff. Each has its histories, and its portrayal differs across the Caribbean.
[Tate Britain]
Taken in the 2022 Tate Britain Commission:
Hew Locke: The Procession
(March 2022 – January 2023)
A procession is part and parcel of the cycle of life; people gather and move together to celebrate, worship, protest, mourn, escape or even to better themselves. This is the heart of Hew Locke’s ambitious new project, The Procession.
The Procession invites visitors to ‘reflect on the cycles of history, and the ebb and flow of cultures, people and finance and power.’ Tate Britain’s founder was art lover and sugar refining magnate Henry Tate. In the installation Locke says he ‘makes links with the historical after-effects of the sugar business, almost drawing out of the walls of the building,’ also revisiting his artistic journey so far, including for example work with statues, share certificates, cardboard, rising sea levels, Carnival and the military.
Throughout, visitors will see figures who travel through space and time. Here, they carry historical and cultural baggage, from evidence of global financial and violent colonial control embellished on their clothes and banners, alongside powerful images of some of the disappearing colonial architecture of Locke’s childhood in Guyana.
The installation takes inspiration from real events and histories but overall, the figures invite us to walk alongside them, into an enlarged vision of an imagined future.
What I try to do in my work is mix ideas of attraction and ideas of discomfort – colourful and attractive, but strangely, scarily surreal at the same time.
Hew Locke
[Tate Britain]
Post-colonial Trade
The textile print on the front of this figure's dress reproduces one of the artist's works from his Share series.
Since 2009, Locke has collected and carefully reworked and painted over original share certificates for defunct companies. This particular share was for the West India Improvement Company. Based in Jamaica, it was formed in 1889 in New York to acquire and develop the Jamaica Railway and large areas of land on the island. Locke decorated the certificate with a bunch of bananas and, peeping out from behind it, the hands and head of the wooden figure of a bird-man spirit carved by the Taíno – Arawak people indigenous to the Caribbean. This is one of two Taíno sculptures in the collection of the British Museum. These pre-colonial carvings were discovered in Jamaica in 1792 and brought to the UK as part of a collection assembled by the nineteenth-century British art dealer William Ockleford Oldman. The Jamaican government has expressed its strong desire for their repatriation.
Another image is of the Fraser plantation house in Guyana, known locally as the 'House of a Thousand Windows'. Since childhood, Locke has admired these wooden buildings, part of a decaying, disappearing heritage...
The influence of both Indian and Indo-Caribbean culture can be seen in The Procession, as in much of Locke’s work to date. It is unclear whether the procession participants are wearing masks or if these are their true faces. Several figures and costumes within The Procession reference specific Caribbean Carnival characters from across the region. These include Mother Sally in her voluminous dress, Midnight Robber, wearing a huge, brimmed hat, Pitchy Patchy, dressed in a suit made of tattered, colourful pieces of cloth, and Sailor Mas, inspired by British, French and American naval staff. Each has its histories, and its portrayal differs across the Caribbean.
[Tate Britain]
Taken in the 2022 Tate Britain Commission:
Hew Locke: The Procession
(March 2022 – January 2023)
A procession is part and parcel of the cycle of life; people gather and move together to celebrate, worship, protest, mourn, escape or even to better themselves. This is the heart of Hew Locke’s ambitious new project, The Procession.
The Procession invites visitors to ‘reflect on the cycles of history, and the ebb and flow of cultures, people and finance and power.’ Tate Britain’s founder was art lover and sugar refining magnate Henry Tate. In the installation Locke says he ‘makes links with the historical after-effects of the sugar business, almost drawing out of the walls of the building,’ also revisiting his artistic journey so far, including for example work with statues, share certificates, cardboard, rising sea levels, Carnival and the military.
Throughout, visitors will see figures who travel through space and time. Here, they carry historical and cultural baggage, from evidence of global financial and violent colonial control embellished on their clothes and banners, alongside powerful images of some of the disappearing colonial architecture of Locke’s childhood in Guyana.
The installation takes inspiration from real events and histories but overall, the figures invite us to walk alongside them, into an enlarged vision of an imagined future.
What I try to do in my work is mix ideas of attraction and ideas of discomfort – colourful and attractive, but strangely, scarily surreal at the same time.
Hew Locke
[Tate Britain]