Fatema Ahmed interviews Guyanese British artist Hew Locke “about decorating statues and the ornamental side of the British Empire” for Apollo (1 October 2025) on the eve of his exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art. [From the October 2025 issue of Apollo. See excerpts below; subscription (here) needed to read full article.] “Hew Locke: Passages” opened at the Yale Center for British Art (second-floor galleries), at Yale University, where it will remain through Sunday, January 11, 2026. See previous post Hew Locke Passages.
Hew Locke can’t remember exactly when, on 7 June 2020, he first heard that the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol had been pulled off its plinth and thrown into the city’s harbour. While he thinks it may have been when the Art Newspaper asked him for comment, that also doesn’t seem right to him: ‘In my mind – memory plays tricks on you – that’s the story I tell myself.’ But now, he wonders, surely he heard the news on the radio first? What he is adamant about is that he was ‘stunned’.
When Black Lives Matter protestors deposed the late 19th-century statue of the 17th-century slave trader, Locke had more reason to be surprised than most. In Bristol, the continued presence of the statue in the heart of the city had been an issue for years, but it wasn’t a national or international debate and Colston’s name was not well known, except to historians of slavery or of Victorian civic sculpture. In 2006, however, the Bristol arts venue Spike Island had invited Locke to take part in the ‘British Art Show 6’. The four pieces in his Restoration series are large-format photographs of statues in the city – of Colston, Edmund Burke, the abolitionist Samuel Morley and Edward VII – mounted on to aluminium and MDF and then bedecked with gold medallions, jewellery and decorations attached to the surfaces. By turning a two-dimensional representation of an object into a different kind of third-dimensional representation, the works blur the boundaries between mediums, between photography and sculpture, in a way that is typical of Locke. The gaudiness of the trinkets are also a challenge to notions of propriety, of what is and isn’t said by public sculpture. At first glance, the decoration seems merely external – a festive get-up for sombre statues – but it is the opposite of a cover-up.
The statue of Colston was proposed and mostly paid for by a local Liberal, who wanted to celebrate his philanthropy in Bristol, skating over the fact that Colston’s fortune came from his shares in the Royal African Company, which had a monopoly for a time on the English slave trade in west Africa, transporting some 188,000 people to the Americas. In 2006, Locke’s dressing up of the statue was a thought experiment. In 2020, the protestors’ pulling it down was a rupture in reality that made the artist’s earlier work prescient. (If only, some commented, he had been allowed to festoon Colston for real, diminishing the figure by seeming to celebrate it, thus allowing it to stay where it was.)
All of this happened early on in the pandemic. Although exhibitions can be a long time in the making and public commissions particularly slow to achieve, to casual onlookers, it might seem as if Locke’s career to date falls into two phases: before and after the pandemic. In recent years, an extraordinary string of exhibitions and commissions have raised his profile and brought his work in front of a mass audience for the first time. In March 2022, a large-scale installation piece, The Procession, occupied the Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain until the following spring, while in the autumn, four sculptures by Locke filled the niches of the Met’s Fifth Avenue facade for the best part of eight months. Later that year, four equestrian Ambassador sculptures were a highlight of the ‘In the Black Fantastic’ group show at the Hayward Gallery in London. In 2024, an installation called Armada (2017–19) formed part of one of the most appealing rooms in ‘Entangled Pasts’, an exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London looking at how the institution’s own history has shaped ideas about empire and migration. Also in 2024, in ‘Hew Locke: what have we here?’ at the British Museum, Locke and his wife, the curator Indra Khanna, were invited to present objects in its collection relating to Britain’s imperial history in Africa, India and the Caribbean, together with new works by Locke. [. . .]
Excerpts from https://apollo-magazine.com/hew-locke-passages-yale-center-interview-empire/
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