Artist Hew Locke

[music] Welcome to Art from the Outside, a podcast for anyone who wants an outside and look at the Art World. I'm Amita Romain, and I'm Will Pally. And each episode, we're talking to the people who inspire us to help unravel the arts. [music] Hey, Well, it's great to see you. How's it going? Hey, Amita, all as well. I am here in wonderful South Paulo. I'm here for Art Week. It's just the best. I'm always so happy to be here. How about you? I'm doing well. I'm actually in New York and gearing up for what I hope will be a really fun Art Week in a couple of weeks when the Freeze Show opens, Future Fair, and Independent Fair opens. We're actually going to be doing a benefit exhibition at Gotham Chelsea to benefit the here and there. So I'm excited preparing for that. That's going to be amazing. Shout out to Elizabeth D, who is the founder of the Independent Art Fair and one of our earliest guests. But yeah, I'm also really excited about this episode. I really enjoyed this conversation. Yeah, me too. It was such a fascinating conversation. And I was really struck by this artist who's had a really long career and has been making very smart political work, critiquing institutions for a long time. But yet does it in a way that is not so black and white and it's really refreshing to hear from voices like that that can really hold two opposing views at once. I totally agree. So let's go for it. Today we are hugely excited to be joined by the artist Hugh Locke. Hugh was born in Edinburgh in 1959, but spent his formative years in Guyana, arriving just as the country was establishing its independence from British rule. He returned to Britain in 1980, where subsequently he received his BA and MA in art. In his work, Hugh explores languages of colonial and post-colonial power and the symbols through which different cultures assume and assert identity. Fusing historical source material with a keen interest in current affairs, he focuses attention, especially on the UK, the monarchy, and his childhood home of the then newly independent Guyana. Hugh's work has been exhibited across the world, but I'm going to mention some personal highlights. One is the procession from 2022, a large-scale installation for the Dvien Hall Commission at Taperiton. Another favorite is guilt, an installation of four gilded sculptures in the shape of trophies that he made for the façade of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, also in 2022. In June, his show Passages will transfer from the Wexner Centre in Columbus to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. And in September, Hugh will open a solo show at PPOW here in New York. Hugh, we're so thrilled to have you here today. Welcome. Hi. Hello, hello. Hugh, we always like to start with a bit of personal background for all of our guests. So can you share a little bit about your background? And if you can recall a specific cultural experience or artwork that inspired you to pursue the arts professionally? Right. As soon as you asked professionally, that's interesting. Both my parents were artists. They're both dead now. My father was a sculptor, my mother was a painter, and I tried very hard not to be an artist. Remember, it's telling my mom that this is not a good idea or good career because look how we're struggling financially. This is not a good idea. And that must have been tough for her to hear from a strappy teenager. But yeah, so I'm the result, basically. My career is a result of you can't escape your destiny, basically. I think for me, becoming an artist, I mean, I was interested in art sort of, I picked it up by Osmosis, should we say. But really, it was in a classroom, a school, a school room, the art class one day, I was painting a high-discous flower. And all of a sudden, I wasn't painting it anymore. I was creating this high-discous flower. I wasn't as if saying, "I'm a copy and a tot." I wasn't copying it. This thing was a living thing. That was quite an eye-opening thing to happen. I've still got it. It's not a very good painting at all. It was quite a shot to see what this thing was. Which we said, "It's not a good idea to be so symbolic and all that." To have top advice, don't necessarily, that was not a great idea to revisit your past. But I still got this piece of work. That's incredible that you've held onto it all of these years. Yeah, I've held onto it all these years. One of these days I may do something with it. Actually, literally speaking of this podcast thinking, "Maybe the time is no. Maybe the time is getting there." I found it so interesting to learn that especially your father was very influential to a lot of developing artists. And you said that it's kind of ironic that both of your parents being artists didn't really directly influence you. But a lot of their students had given up or are not as well known as you. So it seems like that Osmosis really had a big impact. It did have a big impact. Because I picked things up without realizing I was picking things up. I mean, my childhood memories are of my parents making art. You know, my mother was, as I said, was a painter. But she also illustrated the first multiracial children's books in the Caribbean. And we had to go as kids. Can you go and catch me a lizard to paint because I wanted to, I need a lizard for this shop to a book or I need this to need that. So what was interesting to me is that we just took it for granted that this was a normal thing to do. And my father was doing all these crazy sculptures, weird sculptures, which I didn't get at the time at all. I thought, this is what he does. And then years later, I went to art school. And after art school, there was a famous British artistry exhibition called The Other Story. And it was about artists who had migrated from India, the Caribbean, various different countries. It was a group show at the Hayward Gallery. And I went to that show in the late 80s. And I was like, oh shit, my dad is actually good. That was quite a revelation. He was you. Because I was educated by then. I knew the thing was, if you see what I mean. And yeah, interesting, interesting. I guess to shift gears, I mean, you mentioned your arts education and how you moved from Guyana back to London to pursue your arts education. Can you talk about how that dual perspective of living in a former colony and the former Imperial Center shaped the way that you see symbols of power? To keep question to answer. I mean, it did have an impact. I spent a lot of my time trying to be an English artist, whatever the hell that is. And it wasn't me. I spent ages, but those times trying to figure out what the me was. What is my thing? I was experiencing not as bad as my dad. My dad was an artist in London in the 1970s. And that was a tough time to be a black artist. I mean, here's me, I make strays. And for me, I found myself in similar kinds of streets with it to him. It was awkward. The canon of history had been written and set in stone. Could it that way? And certain things were acceptable. And certain things were not acceptable. Certain things were decorative. There's nothing worse than being decorative. I mean, back in those days, I mean, even shooters were described, Matisse is being decorative. Wow. And they met this paper. I could then paper cutouts. History can be friggin' oppressive. Can we be bloody oppressive? And the world that people know today was just a dream on the horizon, you know, to me. Things that people take for granted today. Contemporary art coming out of Africa. People take for granted. It just was not a thing, you know. But I had grown up. It's an art circle around me. We thought even realizing it. One of my earliest memories is of the painter, the abstract painter, Frank Baldwin and my father. They're very close. Very good friends. They have this shouting match. I was like, why are they arguing? Why are they arguing? Why are they asking for this wrong with this guy? And it was just a point about art. I don't even know what the thing was, but I just remember the tone of voice and anger and the passion. So I grew up with this kind of stuff. But then coming to the England, coming to the UK, I had to find something for myself. That's what every artist is looking for. And at that time, it was really, really difficult to shake the oppressive nature of a particular kind of British male thing. And I'm more relaxed about things now, but back then, I succumb to the pressure of, this is good because if Kate says it's good that these other guys says it's good, it's got to be good. There must be important, you know, not necessarily so, you know. But of course, these institutions have changed completely and radically. This is, I'm talking about a long time ago, but you knew where the power laid, put it that way, you know. I mean, coming back to my dad, at the end of the 80s, he was on this channel for this news program in London. And he was talking about art, you know. And I sort of thought, yes, I get back as well. I understand that what he's saying, we, as in we from the Caribbean, the English speaking Caribbean, was sort of being as better, good for sports, good for cricket, but not for art, you know. Hmm. It's interesting, you, I'd love to talk about your work. How do you think about the work you make now? And more specifically, you do use a variety of materials, you know, I think about in the procession, for instance, it was a combination of fabrics, of cardboard, of wood, and even, you know, share certificates. Can you tell us about what draws you to those various materials? How do you think about the materials you use in your work? Each piece of work has its own demands, but I like mixing things up. So I like the concept of say having bronze decorated, a bronze decorated with cheaper material and trying to lift that cheaper material up to elevating it to something really special. But I get bored, the honest of you, you know. And I need to keep excited. And I'm always looking for the next thing, the next excitement, the next hits, shall we see, you know. And yeah, you're right. I mean, the, the, the, the procession, when that, when I knew that was going to work, to potentially work, at least, was when I realized I could print my own fabric from my own work. And that was really a something, and not just that, realizing that from previously that if you take these sheer certificates and blow them up, all of a sudden all the small print literally is revealed. And that says a lot about the history of the past and present history of power. And also, I always say that if I wasn't an artist, I would have been a historian. The history is more interesting these days to people. Just judged by the success of certain history podcasts. But for me, I always wanted to sort of, I might have been a historian, I might have been an archaeologist, in the end, that being an artist with an interesting history. Cardboard, I've used a lot in the past, because Cardboard is a, is a material which is very interesting. It's useful, but it's cheap. It's imparmanent, but then I've seen Picasso's cardboard sculptures, but I remember seeing some photos and thinking, "Yeah, you see Picasso used cardboard, that's good enough for me." But it's about putting different spins and things, but also sending something out of my comfort zone, or thinking, "Well, I've got a bag of tricks here. This is not working. This is not working. Can I try this? Can I try that?" The procession, the precursor to the procession was a piece called The Tourists. And this was a piece done on HMS Belfast. I'm saying this to explain something. And what, and I was asked to do something on this battleship in the Thames, which is a museum, an iconic piece of British military history. And at the time, I was asked to do this. There were lots of figures, mannequins, and they were placed around the whole ship doing casts. So all these sailors, these look-alike sailors from the 1970s with weird wigs, quite creepy, to be honest. And I realized that I could transform this place by putting masks on these figures. And all of a sudden, oh yeah, to put a mask on this figure, and his whole purpose became completely different and we purpose the whole boat. It's so interesting to think about how you have these ideas sometimes. And then like you were mentioning eight years later, you're like, oh, that was a really good idea. And in doing research to prepare for this interview, I was really struck by how many times you were just so ahead of your time. When I think about monuments, for example, and the proposal that you created for a public arts organization in London dealing with a sculpture of Colston, and it wasn't actually accepted at the time, but fast forward to 2020, that sculpture was actually taken down. So I guess it's a long-winded way of saying that at a time when monuments are being removed or reconsidered, can you talk about how societies should respond to these monuments with complicated histories and maybe discuss that work? Okay, well, to go back over what you say, this all started back in 2000 or 2001. And it was a proposal, I won a big award, so I thought, I've arrived, you know, then I approached an organization with a proposal to decorate, dress, a statue in the house of the parliament, just outside the house of the parliament. Of course, I knew it was a waste of time, you know, but if I thought, well, these guys are powerful, they can swing anything, you know, but the Colston thing, by then, these had become a series of impossible proposals, which I knew would never ever happen. And when Colston came down, after his piece I'd made, I was in shock because sometimes you don't believe things can change, you know, and that's it. And all of a sudden, and there were so many things which coalesced for this moment to happen. It wouldn't have happened maybe two years later, it wouldn't have happened five years before, definitely not, but this particular moment that heated moment of COVID, Black Lives Matter, it was a specific moment. I was contacted by some arts organization, what do you think? And I was like, wow, I just honestly, I never thought I would see the day. For me, I took part in 2015, then in New Orleans, I think it was 2015, New Orleans prospect. And that was when they were started to have serious discussions about taking down Confederate monuments. The reason why I got interested is because who are these people? And why are they there? And what's the justification of this? I mean, who made you go? Who got you in charge? And then you start to realize that, and also it's because of this, particularly in London, and maybe in other parts of the US. But that was more thinking about the British point that you would say, you walk past these things every day, you take them for granted, they're just part of your daily thing, you know, you're not really paying much to you. But I often say, they're so visible that they're indiscible. And then all of a sudden, you start to look into who these people were. And you think, well, hang on a minute, this is a problem. And apparently, a couple of friends reminded me that back in the 1980s, I was driving through Bristol with him. And I looked at the course and statue, which stood in the image, it still stands in the middle of Bristol. No, sorry, it doesn't stand a course at the same time. You see, as a complete slip there, like, I can't even believe it's gone, you know, it's been gone for years. Anyway, and I said to him, oh, that's got to go, that statue has got to go, you know, and now it's gone, you know. And so it is possible, this possible institutions are very important to you. Maybe to the point about complexity and even how things are different between the US and the UK, maybe you can tell us a little bit about the installation for the Met facade guilt, which was a series of four large or eight gilded sculptures in the shape of trophies. When I take on a public art thing, there's a lot of pressure because public art is different. You know, when you're out in public, there's certain, certain constraints, you know, to me, there's certain amount of responsibility, shall we say. But also, there's practical things. Those niches and the Met are potential nightmare. But I take it out earlier on, whatever it had to be gilded, it had to be shiny and bright. That way it would stand out against whatever exhibition was being advertised. But the piece was about, it's about provenance, but it's also about museums, where does stuff come from? Where does all this stuff come from? So it talked about the sort of fragments and it's about, how does something get to the to the mat, how does something become? I think, and I saw the mat is a trophy of New York. It's a trophy of the US. So we make trophies. Okay fine, good. But then, but what's inside the mat are also trophies of the mat. And then there's, so to the certain master of the way things come from, you know, how do we get here? And one of the aspects of it when referring to objects, like, to Poo Sultan's gun on which there's a tiger emblem because the British killed the guy overthrowing. And there was a national holiday when they overthrow him. And, and a public holiday was declared in England. Now, finally, India is ours. That's what they said. India, this massive trophy. So that's fragment is on this trophy of a trophy. But there's a Baroque monster, the base of these cultures, what was a Baroque monster representing us, the public coming to consume this stuff. But it's representing me as well. So all this sounds being gathered from all over the world, one way or another. And it's there for my consumption, my entertainment. And but what the thing is, two of these sculptures, two of these pieces of guilt, which are on the mat, they were broken off. They're not complete. And it's to do with the fact that you complete it in your mind. What trophy, how do you finish this trophy arc in your mind? And also, the trophies look three-dimensional, but then you get close up and you realize they just propped up by scaffolding in the back. They're not real. They're facade. So it's a met facade, a facade for the met facade. But even more than that, across the road, there's a Philip Morris building with an extra story added to it, which is a facade. It's not real. And so it's a facade facing a facade. I like playing and twisting and turning these little games around with my head. But at the same time, all this intellectual stuff, all this thinking, all this stuff and all this game today, it's nothing if the bloody thing doesn't work. It has to work visually. And when I knew the mat thing had worked, was when I saw it one morning and realized that part of it was lit up by the sun coming down the avenue. And then part of it wasn't. And it was like a kind of thing where it should surely be. It would look different, different times would be. And then evening at night, it looked very different as well. You can gather by what one says that I like the piece of work. I thought it would go. Well, I mean, I love that you mentioned that because I know in other interviews you've talked about, kind of using beauty and making sure that your works stand alone on their own as an aesthetically pleasing object. And then obviously it kind of draws a viewer in. And then hopefully if they're interested in it, they'll unpack the deeper layered meanings that you're trying to communicate. Yeah. So can we talk a little bit about that because, you know, your work is incredibly unique. Can you talk about why decoration is such an important strategy to you? It's purely instinctive. It's what I grew up with. And it was about allowing myself the permission to do that. That was the important thing for me. Because what I tend to do is, like I made an image of the queen, the little queen, it is about a second. Her nose was made out of bright fluorescent green bats, plastic bats. And I was walking past the shop in Nottingham. And I saw these bats sitting there waiting for some crazy person like me to come and buy them. This is the Halloween. It's been on gone. This is what's left over. And I saw them and I thought that's pigment for me. So I was picking this stuff up as if it was pigment. And I've been doing this for a very, very long time. So since pretty much since the 80s. And then you add on and you build up and you add on when you build up. And it's instinct. You know, I keep coming back to it. It's instinct. Like for example, using metal ribbons, ribbons from metals, which I've used for years, many years now. And you go, you know what? That can work for this. And oh, but my studio has a collection of objects which just seem to work. It's as simple as that. It's about permission. It's about lowering your submission to do what you want to do. And that's the one thing. It's easier today for an artist to do that. But today, maybe there's this, there's too much choice. And you only do only constraint as always for artists. Certainly for recent graduates is money. That's constraint. But you can theoretically do anything. I'm talking about the time when you couldn't theoretically do anything. And like for example, I was working with crochet decades ago. And knitted crochet pieces. So I can do something with this. And I thought this is exciting. This is really great. And then about about a year later, I saw Sex in the City Sarah Jessica Parker covering a sofa with a knitted blanket. And I said, oh, that's the end of that. This is a bit stupid of me to think that, you know, because I could still continue doing what I did. But I felt a bit about my heart sank a bit, put it that way. You I'd love to ask one of the series that I'm absolutely obsessed with that I had to ask about is the motifs of boats. And boats have what I love about from what I understand about boats. As you know, you've also mentioned that you sort of work in in circles almost that some things come and some things go. And boats have been part of your practice since as early as as 1994 with arc or as recently I believe as an incredible presentation of like a flotilla called Odyssey of boats at Art Basel Switzerland last year. We would love to know what do the boats represent? They represent many things. I mean, the first boat I did was in 1987 and it was a model. It's not like my best piece of work, but my heart was in the right place. It was a boat to take back the souls of dead slaves to Africa. So that was the idea behind that one. And what I felt was every year or so, I would need to make a boat just to feel sane literally because I grew up in a in a country where boats were a constant thing. Guyana, the world means land of many waters to get anywhere. You'd have to take a ferry off across the big rivers. And boats were all over the place. And when we went into the interior of the country, there'd be creeks and you'd be paddling in boats and canoes and stuff like that. So some years ago, this would have been in the early 2000s, late 90s. I went and hollered the Portugal and went to a fisherman's chapel. And the man who went to a fishing and I said, man, because that was what it was. There was a boat, a voltage boat on the altar. And I saw, wow, there's a tiny chapel with this voltage boat. Flowers around it. It was a festival at the time. And that's really had a real impact on me. And then I started noticing that this was a thing in churches on the continent of Europe. So Amsterdam, Germany, France, you'd have these bolted boats donated by a ship's captain donated by somebody who was thankful for having survived a life at sea. And I realized that in this particular church, I could make a contemporary version of that. And it's now in the Perez Art Museum in Miami. And I've made subsequently smaller groupings, much more detailed groupings. So the boats these days tend to be smaller, more detailed. And you don't walk under them. You walk around them and you look into them because all these boats, nobody's, they know people on the boats, no figures at all because the person traveling there is you, the viewer. And they work. People have a particular feeling about boats. Let's say a model boat is a very different thing to a model plane. People feel, people can you can hold it in your mind and you can hold it in your hands. We're a powerful thing. And we love them, which is a way to say, it cringes, you seem to say, but it's true. People like boats, you know. It's inherent in us. Boats are there to take you from one world to another world, from one life to another life. Showing the work in England was one thing. Showing it in Miami was something very different. They have a very recent history of migration by boat. And that was saying, when I was a kid, I took a boat, and this is in the 60s, I took a boat from Guyana to England and back again and that had quite an impact on me. But everything I do, it has to be real. It has to be believable as a real thing. So the bolts, well I say they have to look real, they have to look as if they've had a life, they've had a history to them. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, artists are strange business, you know, artists are strange business. Well, since Will got to mention some of his favorite works, I wanted to just take an opportunity to ask a question about some of my favorite works, which are works that deal with imagery of the British royal family. So you mentioned the, the bus of Queen Elizabeth II. I know you've made other works that deal with the Queen's coat of arms. And I wonder if you could just talk about how you think about the tension between kind of institutional critique and validation. Because I thought it was so interesting that you're making works like this. You were also in 2023 named an officer of the order of the British Empire for services to art. So I decided I wanted to go drawing of Princess Margaret. It was a photograph, a photograph, a sick by Cecil Bitten, who was one of the royal photographers. And I thought, right, and I thought, why do you want to do this, you, and I thought, um, don't think about it, just do it, you know, and then ask the question later. And sometimes later realize it was to do with the fact that there was somebody who, if there were a couple of years older, they would have been Queen, and they had to be very different. They'd like to be very different. If you watch the Crown, which I avoided for quite a while, the series The Crown, the first series is actually very good actually. And it showed up the situation of being a younger sister and your older sister is the Queen, and you are not that at all. Your life is different. Anyway, so I do this drawing, and then I did a couple more drawings of the Queen's mother. Why do any things? But also, pushing the boat saying, how far can I push these? How strange can I make them? Because these people are powerful, but not just that. What it was about in the end was about identity. What is it mean to be British? Yeah, and I just worked and it worked and it and eventually I realized that that's what it was about. It was about identity. In Afghanistan, which is started by then, the British soldiers were fighting for Queen and country. The Queen was official head of state. My passport has the Queen's quarter bombs on it. Syratically, it's owned by the Queen. The Queen opened the Queen, and I was in the King now, opens parliament. If one day decided, you know what, the hell with this, I'm about enough of this crap. You know, I'm not going in today. Then that's a constitutional issue. It's just a very strange and interesting situation. One of the things that we really admire about you in your practice is that you can explore such waiting themes, but also in a way that's with irreverence and humor, which is really remarkable. You know, I think the way that you speak about, it makes me think about the way you've spoken about your the importance of your own family, for instance, and done it with such humor. The story you tell, for instance, about your father and how you saw his work and found it. Suddenly, the Haywood Gallery, and suddenly, it changed how you thought about him. So to switch to a more lighthearted part of the conversation, we ask, is there a funny or revealing or surprising anecdote that listeners haven't heard before? Is there something you want to keykey about? This shows you should really read all the questions before you do a particular podcast. I can't really think of anything as such. Well, it doesn't have to be a humorous anecdote. It could be just something like a story or something that you haven't shared with very many audiences before. I know you've also talked about how you've had this really tight knit community of artists' friends that have been part of your life throughout your journey. You shared an anecdote about being at the Venice Biennial when Sonia Boyce represented the UK Pavilion. What a beautiful moment that was for all of the artists that have been part of this community to show up and celebrate that. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that? Yeah, I mean, that was a big, big deal. But I think it's going to be repeated again this year with Lupina Hamid because she's part of that generation as well. A number of artists I know who are showing in the Arsenal or the Gideini. I think it's what to say. I didn't see this happening, basically. I didn't see this happening at all. It's good. It's a good thing. I'm sitting down here and my father is having a retrospective, posthumously retrospective, 15 years after he died. And all of a sudden, people are starting to think, well, actually, he's quite good, but he would never have got to break back in the day. You have to go through a whole bunch of bullshit hoops. But artists have to go so nonsense. The story you shared about your father being close with Frank Bowling and getting in passionate debates about art and who would have thought, now his estate is represented by Howlser and Worth, one of the biggest mega galleries in the global art market. Exactly. I mean, the thing about this is that all this stuff I'm talking about is that if you told me 10 years ago that I would have been given a duvine gallery at Tate Britain to do, I would have said no bloody way. I couldn't see that happening because I saw at the time you had to be nominated, at least nominated for the Turner Prize to get that. There's so many things which are shifted and changed in the last six years. Which if you told me what would have happened, there's like, no, I can't see that happening at all. In that case, you close with one final question, which is a really nice one, I think. You have spoken about change at the end of every conversation we'd like to end on a forward-looking note. So we ask every guest, what are you looking forward to in the next six months? Well, I've got a show coming up at Open In The Wexner looking forward to seeing how that is received. The show transposed Houston MFA. It's looking forward to that as well, seeing all that, and you see. And then basically I'm working on something for PPOW Gallery in September. So that's the new work. So that's what I'm focusing on. I'm always focusing on the future. And artists, I think, there's certainly me anyway, I'm always like 10 steps ahead of everything. I don't mean the public, I mean 10 steps ahead of where I am today. I always think, God, yeah, if you can do that. And I think you tell yourself calm down to you. Let's get this stage over first. Let's get this bloody, this body of work done. And then we can cut. Yeah, so it's constantly, constantly like a magpie just looking for hunting the next thing, you know, hunting, hunting, hunting. I just come back, I just come back from Guyana. And that's, and I'm about processing photographs I've taken there of old houses. We should be in a bandendum collapsing. And there's a all sorts of colonial, deep, long history stories going on there. So I'm starting to tell myself stories about these buildings, which are photographed. And some of these buildings only exist in my photographs. Well, you, I have to say that we are so excited for we're based in New York and we're so excited for the exhibition at PPOW that we have such admiration respect. And actually one of our first interviews was with Wendy from PPOW. So we love them. New York is very lucky to have your exhibition. So that's at least for us selfishly, that's something we are really looking forward to. Thanks for listening to this episode of Art from the Outside. As a friendly reminder, please subscribe and give us a rating on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can also follow us on Instagram and Twitter at Art from the Outside podcast. Our sound engineering is by Hanger Studios, photography, by Henry K. Vega, and original music by Lola's Ghost. Stay well, be safe, and hope you'll join us for the next episode.