Hew Locke - The Procession

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

We have all taken part in some sort of procession. People assemble and move together to celebrate, worship, and protest. mourn. escape or to better themselves. Hew Locke's The Procession evokes all such endeavours." is populated by imagined people who move through this imposing Neoclassical space, claiming it for themselves.

Locke's installation takes as its starting point the history and character of Tate Britain's building and its original benefactor, the sugar refining magnate Henry Tate. More broadly, with The Procession. Locke invites visitors to reflect on the cycles of history, and the ebb and flow of cultures, people, finance and power.

The figures travel through space but also through time. They carry historical and cultural baggage: the evidence of global financial and violent colonial control embellishes their clothes and banners. Images of the colonial architecture or Locke's childhood Luvana emblazon the flags and their bearers, its flooded fields and rotten wooden walls vanishing under rising sea levels. Despite this, their attire and stance suggest power and self-assertion.

Locke occupies a space that was founded on the wealth derived from an industry previously built on the labour of enslaved African people and their descendants, and which subsequently relied on the indentured labour of Asian people. Locke says he 'makes links with the historical after-effects of the sugar business, almost drawing it out of the walls of the building. The Procession also carries Locke's own past artistic journey, with imagery linked to his previous work incorporating statues of rising sea levels, Carnival and the military.

While being marked by history, The Procession's participants are not constrained by it. These fragments come together to usher new meanings and sensations, stirring collective memories. tears and desires. His work evokes real events and histories, and yet presents them as aesthetic fiction As we join The Procession, and Locke's artistic imagination begins to work on us, The figures invite us to walk alongside them for a while, into an enlarged vision of an imagined future.

Locke was born in Edinburgh in 1959. He lived in Georgetown Guvana, from 1966 to 1980. He has been living and working in Cornwall and London since then.