Boats are something of a preoccupation for Hew Locke. He has mounted mini flotillas at the Diaspora Pavilion in Venice and in a Folkestone church, erected the Golden Horde at Frieze London and presented an apparently abandoned vessel in the tunnels at Waterloo. The British artist, who spent his formative years in Guyana, uses the language of seafaring to interrogate the legacies of colonial power and commerce. “Guyana means ‘land of many waters’—you are constantly aware of boats,” he explains. “I went to Guyana as a five-year-old kid on a boat. I came back here on a boat. So many things, good and bad, travel by sea.” Locke utilizes found materials, everyday ephemera and glittering trinkets to build dense sculptures that both reference and subvert the iconography of military office, Victorian statuary and other forms of pagentry. In his new exhibition at Ikon in Birmingham he presents sculptures, drawings, paintings and photography, including The Tourists, which recasts his artistic intervention on board the British battle cruiser HMS Belfast, which reimagines an alternative life for the crewmates on board.
