Hew Locke, Gilt, 2022, Fiberglass, stainless steel, gilding, and oil-based paint, dimensions variable, installation view The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY on view 2022-3 image courtesy Hales Gallery, London, UK
Donald Locke, Trophies of Empire, 1972-4, Ceramic, wood, metal, glass and other materials, 1905 x 1295 x 203 mm, collection of Tate Britain © Estate of Donald Locke
An Intergenerational Dialogue
Donald Locke’s Legacy and Hew Locke’s Epic Narrativity
By Sara Buoso
Introduction by Deanna Sirlin
Hew Locke photo © Indra Khanna
Donald Locke photo Brenda Locke © Donald Locke Estate
The sculptor Donald Locke (1930 –2010) was born in Guyana, on the Northern coast of South America. In 1959, Locke studied at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. In 1979 he moved to Phoenix, Arizona on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he lived until he moved to Atlanta, Georgia with his spouse, art consultant Brenda Locke, in 1990.
I met Donald shortly after his arrival in Atlanta. Donald and I had many conversations about painting, sculpture, and ceramics. Donald also wrote about art and reviewed my work for Creative Loafing, a text I wish I still had – these were the pre-digital days. When I traveled to London UK for the first time, Donald suggested I meet his son Hew Locke (born in Edinburgh in 1959). I recall that my spouse and I met Hew at a juried drawing exhibition sponsored by Pizza Express Prospects in a space under a railroad bridge. I remember the evening well, as everyone thought my spouse was the juror – renowned British pop artist Peter Blake.
I continued to follow Hew’s work in exhibitions in Venice, Italy during the Biennales—most recently as part of a show of UK artists at the Diaspora Pavilion in 2017––where we had chance meetings. Hew showed a series of small boats ornamented with three-dimensional elements and talismans that hung from the ceiling. I remember how much I liked being surrounded by these works in the context of this exhibition. Hew received a commission from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for Gilt, four sculptural trophies shown on the museum’s façade in 2022-23. His figurative sculptural installation The Procession, was on view at the ICA Watershed at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA from May 23 through September 2, 2024. He will be represented by two exhibitions in London in the fall of 2024, one at the British Museum and one at Hale Gallery. Donald Locke’s work opens at the Atlanta Contemporary on October 24, 2024.
While thinking about the legacy of this family of artists, I found that Donald and Hew have both addressed ideas of power in their work. Their interest in power, symbols, and ideas are their shared family legacy.
Deanna Sirlin
Atlanta, Georgia
September 2024
Doanld Locke in his studio in 2005
photo: Tom W Meyer
This is a joint conversation about histories, lands, legacies and the future. We entered in conversation with Brenda Locke, spouse of artist Donald Locke, and suggested an intergenerational dialogue with his elder son, artist, Hew Locke, based in London. Following their artistic research and journeys through Guyana, Scotland, England, and America, this conversation deals with Donald’s and Hew’s practices and legacies, their shared interest in spirituality and symbolism, and their distinguished artistic postures and traits.
Sara Buoso
Rome, Italy
August 2024
Hew Locke in his Studio
©Hugo Glendinning, Courtesy of Acme, Acme Archive
Sara Buoso: The practice of Donald Locke is imbued with diverse geopolitical and cultural connotations. From Georgetown in Guyana, to Edinburgh, and London, Atlanta was his last place of residence. Would you each like to tell us what makes you feel connected to Atlanta as compared to other global cities and experiences?
Brenda Locke: After moving to Atlanta in 1990, we were very much aware of artists like Thornton Dial, Souls Grown Deep and the Gee’s Bend textiles, all of which were broadly exhibited in the1990s. But also, just by living in the area, The South naturally found its influence in his practice; series like The Southern Mansions, The American Caste series, and the Peachtree series all reflect this. They did indeed have a bearing on Donald’s practice in Atlanta. It’s interesting, too, that although rooted in his European education, this juxtaposition awakened his early interest in Guyanese folklore and Amerindian influences.
Hew Locke: It is only because of my dad and Brenda that I have a connection with Atlanta. I remember noticing my father's work becoming more inspired by Atlanta and the history of the Deep South over the years. Wherever you live, you can't forget that you live there, and you take on board what's there.
I remember an early trip where we drove together to Macon, Georgia. It was a Sunday. It was really interesting because we were talking about what the African American experience is like today. I came away with the feeling that the Civil War feels like it was yesterday from the point of view of someone who lives in The South: the remnants of that and the vibe of past events are still there. That was interesting to me, it was an eye-opening trip. I have made subsequent trips to Macon and to other parts of Georgia, driving around with my wife. Me and my father would talk regularly and extensively about Guyanese art and about art in general. What is good from an artistic point of view? How can you tell if a work of art is good? That's something which has always fascinated me. I remember talking to him about me going to Seville and seeing some paintings by the artist Valdés Leal from the seventeenth century. These were extraordinary paintings, so why has this artist been forgotten? We talked a lot about Matisse and Cezanne. It was great to talk to my father, an artist deeply aware of politics and who understood the nature of identity politics and other subjects. He had a deep understanding of where I was coming from. It's interesting that every conversation with my father often would end up talking about Frank Bowling, who's now gone on to great success late in life. My father knew Frank for a very long time and every time he came to London, he'd have to go around and see Frank, and they would sit down there and talk for hours and hours about art.
Donald Locke, Untitled: Blue Rain, 1996, acrylic, fur, steel, wood, mm and collage on canvas on wood panel, 48 x 72 inches © Donald Locke Estate Photo: Tom Meyer
SB: These life-journeys and experiences may have informed a particular sense of place. It may also be different nowadays in the global era…
BL: It absolutely appeared to be so for Donald. Writers, researchers, and academics are interested in this aspect of Donald’s practice nowadays. To cite one reference, in Donald Locke: The Plantation Series, scholar Giulia Smith retraces Donald Locke’s interest in the plantation system, a symbolic figure that continued to appear in his work in the 70s, but also in his large-scale paintings in the late 90s. In her reading, she refers to it as a sense of place. Another feature that Donald used as a practice in his paintings in the 90s was taking photographs of his work and putting them as collage elements in the paintings. He also took photographs of various other events and people and places them in his paintings.
HL: For me, the sense of place is the feeling of living in a place, but like for many people, it is also the feeling of living with your own past, your past histories. My father talked about driving in Atlanta and passing some of these wooden houses with their porches in the front, and maybe just for the split of a second, he would have seen Guyana, and then suddenly that image would be gone. For me, this is the sense of a place. You live somewhere, and you love the place you are living in because this is your life, but for most people from an immigrant background, we need to take into account individual baggage, each individual’s history. These people are living in two places at once or they can decide to fluctuate both wildly.
Hew Locke, Armada in Here’s the Thing at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham UK, 2019. Courtesy the artist and Ikon
SB: Donald Locke experimented with different mediums, but his object-oriented artistic research remains a distinctive trait of his practice, as if transfiguring spirituality into matter and sculptures into vessels. Did he mature a consistent method during his career?
BL: There was always an inner core to Donald’s work that found its expression materially. Nowadays, we could use the term "spiritual," if you wish. No matter what medium or era, that “presence” was there.
Hew Locke, Where Lies the Land? 2, 2019, Acrylic on wood with metal, plastic, textile, enamel, and found objects, 75 5/8 x 76 3/4 x 22 1/2 inches, Courtesy the artist
SB: Object-based artistic research seems to inform your practice too, Hew. Although your practice expands and experiments with multimedia forms such as installation and performance…
HL: My work falls between the legacy of my father, Donald, and my mother, Leila Locke, who was a painter. It falls directly between them and that's how I ended up being the person, the artist that I am.
As I often said, I have never been taught to become an artist, no one taught me this profession. I used to pick up things by osmosis, by being around them and what they were doing, but I wasn't taught by them at all. I developed a feeling, I may say, and I can see how people often see the connection between my father’s work and mine. I don’t deny there are connections in our work because I used to talk to him a lot about what was contemporary art, particularly when in London over the decades.
However, I was not interested in fashion or trends, I was coming from somewhere else. In particular, I found myself working in a time and place when to do anything decorative or craft-based was deeply frowned upon. When I started practicing years ago with papier-mâché, that was seen as a negative thing. Before the artist Franz West was recognized for his papier-mâché sculptures, I was always looking for the odd thing, the left field, looking at circus art or carnival art among others, and taking carnival art as a serious subject. I used to have a book called Caribbean Festival Arts, almost permanently on loan when I was at art school, and this was my key bibliographical reference. For me it was serious, but it was not valued by the fine art world at the time. Anything decorative was frowned upon. The traditional distinction between high art and low art was still evident back then. Nowadays, it is normal for artists not to have these barriers, but myself, I remember having to deal with these boundaries. That was the reason why it was great talking to my father back then, because he didn't place these judgments. He saw what I was doing as quite serious.
Donald Locke, Stewartville Witch (Wood Carrier of Stewartville, The Old Witch), 2004-2005, wood, wax, tree branches, 33″ x 40″ x 13″ in the 2009 UK exhibition, Pork Knocker Dreams
SB: Would you like, Brenda, to summarize the evolution of Donald’s artistic investigation from his formative years in Edinburgh and London to his moving to Atlanta?
BL: Clay was Donald’s first love, absolutely. After early experiments, he was reintroduced to ceramics at Edinburgh College of Art, through Katie Horsmann, who was director there, and brought him close to a group of American ceramicists, the California Clay movement in the late 50s, early 60s. They had a freedom with clay as material that Donald hadn't experienced before, and this influenced him deeply. The forms that he was interested in were nature-based like, palm seeds, coco de mer fruits. He never really left ceramics.
While in Arizona in the 80s he returned to bronze, having experimented with the medium in London and combined its use along with ceramics. The vessel form was still there. He was also influenced by James Tower, Professor at Bath Academy of Art who was represented by a prestigious west end gallery, Gimpel Fils, in London, which effectively broke down defining barriers between art & craft to suggest new orientations. In the London years, alongside the biomorphic forms, there was a series of structured, constructed sculptures: The Black Box series, where he combined ceramics, metal, and other materials.
In Arizona, his practice assumed a different approach. He was working mainly in bronze, developing figurative forms some of which were abstracted or truncated. And then when we moved to Atlanta, his practice became a different thing again: he was experimenting with various mediums, being particularly interested in the meaning of sculpture, how the structure of painting could be sculpture – and produced a magnificent body of large-scale works in the 90s.. He also explored drawing for its expressivity, its link to inner explorations. He made small graphite pieces and large charcoal, chalk works. Eventually, in his last few years, he made intense, haunting drawings that wrapped around ceramic vessel-like forms, each producing a private folkloric scene, maybe pre-Columbian in intent. Between 2002 and 2006, he also produced a triptych consisting of the sculptures, Bush Doctor, Hindu Prince, and Princess Ra, a series spiritualist Surrealist Manifesto.
Donald Locke, Plantation Blairmont, 1972-74, ceramic, wood, steel, carpeting, dried grass, 21" x 18" x 18"
Photo: Tom W Meyer, Collection of High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia
SB: But there are also differences and distinguishing traits between Donald’s and Hew’s practices. In my reading, Donald’s work may relate to art in terms of action in a political sense. Your work, Hew, seems interwoven within a deep and thorough sense of history.
BL: Fundamentally, Donald’s work continued with an underlying sense of “art as activism.” And there are always multiple meanings to be teased out of each work – that’s maybe the aspect of symbolism you refer to. Back in London in the 1970’s, his work was black, chromatically and politically.
HL: History is how I tend to do… I am interested both in history and political history. I am used to listening to history podcasts while I'm in the studio and this keeps me grounded in a way. In other words, I use history as a way to explain something I have difficulty dealing with today. Quite often, I find myself going back into history to explain the world in general. I will go back into history and begin to reason about how one event led to the other and how ultimately, how we have evolved socially as people on this planet––about historic situations that explain how one phenomenon came out of that, and that situation came out of that, and here we are. This explains my interest in statues, which I had long before the controversy of the statue toppling in the US and the rest of the world. When observing public portrait statues, I usually begin to question: what is this figure doing there? What is its place? Why is it there? Why not somebody else? It is the historical situation that helps me understand causes and consequences and why some people are visible, and others remain invisible. History is relevant: how did it happen? How did we get here?
Hew Locke, The Procession, Installation of 129 figures, plastic, cardboard, fabric, wood, paper, metal, and mixed media, dimensions vary with installation
SB: Your practice, Hew, also foregrounds, a powerful visual narrative…
HL: In my practice, there is a narrative element. It may be because I am making large pieces of work, like the Procession, 2022, and I tell myself stories about each individual piece or each individual character.
What's interesting about the Southern tradition, my father would talk about it, he used to say that in The South, people always want a story about the work. It's a land of stories, an area of storytellers. The work is not just a painting on a wall but what's the story behind it? We are different artists, but we had similar things in common.
My work has a narrative driving it.
The Procession is definitely an epic narrative: a massive statement. The narratives, big or small, tend to emerge over time as I make a piece. I sometimes find that it can be intimidating to make a giant-size piece of art, and I need to start slowly, bit by bit, but narrative is important. I've often felt that I had to be a figurative artist so that I had company, literally. The figures, the things I'm working with, they’re company for me. I'm sitting here looking at an image of the late Queen Elizabeth II, a work I started in 2019, and it has taken me a year after she died to be able to finish it off. I have always enjoyed stories but not a specific narrative.
And even in my father’s work, I have often felt the narrative was there, but not one imposing a single meaning. I do remember him collecting images of soldiers from the Civil War. Eventually, his work has gained a different narrative at the end. He lived in The South long enough for him to become part of its story, as well as for his Guyanese and British periods. When his piece was on show at the National Museum, of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., it was appropriate, appropriate because it was reflecting a migrant's and immigrant's voice, but from someone who is now home.
Hew Locke, Souvenir 25 (Princess Alexandra), 2024, mixed media on antique Parianware,13 1/4 x 9 1/8 x 4 inches
SB: History and narrativity eventually inform the symbolism that you aim to cultivate in your practices…
HL: His work was highly symbolic as well as formally rigorous. This was a development of concerns he'd had all his life. I talked a lot with my father about Amerindian arts and culture, and how it was an influence in his work, for example the pre-Columbian imagery in some of his early paintings.
Myself, I am also interested in symbolism and I'm literally looking at a symbol right now. The image of Queen Elizabeth II is one I've worked with for years. It stands in for all sorts of complex and contradictory things, and I’ve had long discussions with my dad about this iconic image over the years.
Hew Locke, Happy Queen, 2003, cardboard, acrylic, permanent-pigment marker pen, and graphite, 88 1/2 x 71 1/2 inches
SB: You were citing this conversation when driving, on what makes a good work of art. And when do you both consider an artwork as finished? And what about your relationship with the audience?
BL: When an artwork is deemed finished is the artist’s decision in the end. As far as audience, Donald did not contemplate that presence. He worked centrally for research and for himself as an artist and an academic; an audience was not part of his process. On the other hand, he was very comfortable out there in the world with an audience.
HL Myself, I don't expect anything from the viewer. I just present something to them. You're hoping to catch people's attention and hopefully inspire some to delve in deeper and send their minds on a journey and begin to critically question things and not just accept what's literally handed down to them. Who am I to dictate to anybody what to think or feel? That's my feeling. But, I am an artist, and I hope my work connects with people because until you put the work out in public, there's a certain aspect of it which is not really alive yet. The piece finishes when you put it in front of an audience, for me anyway. I think for my dad, too and, now after ten years, there is a renewed interest in his work––and a new audience.
Hew Locke, Foreign Exchange 2, 2024, plastic, metal, wood, glass, plant fibre, acrylic, and enamel paint, 27 3/4 x 19 x 41 1/8 inches
SB: You exhibited together twice. Do you think he was aware of the importance of the legacy he was conveying, particularly given the fact that he was an artist himself?
How important is it to think about this legacy at the present time and for future perspectives?
BL: It’s just unfortunate, and makes me sad, that Donald passed before he was able to see the two exhibitions in which his and Hew’s work were included together. I am sure he would have regarded that as a highlight of his career. As far as legacy, he was definitely aware of its importance. He made copious notes and wrote extensively. He wanted to make sure that Guyana and Guyanese art had recognition. He started an anthology The Unseen Shore, which was to include many Guyanese artists practicing today, both in Guyana and abroad. Now that I'm retired, I am fully involved with the estate and I wear an archivist’s hat at all times. I am deliberately laying the groundwork for Donald’s legacy. His papers have been donated to Emory University Library, and I have provided an annual fellowship in his name for scholars to research his papers.
HL: We exhibited together at Tate Britain in two exhibitions: Artist and Empire, 2015-2016, and Life Between Islands, 2021-2022. We were showing together, and my work was shown opposite his, and it was a good feeling.
I never deeply understood his contribution when I was young. But then in the 80s, I went to visit the exhibition The Other Story, at the Hayward Gallery in London, when I had just finished art school. I thought it was a good work; it was an abstract work, an abstract sculpture. But I also realized it was symbolic of something about confinement and constrained and being trapped. So, it’s not surprising that after that particular body of work had been completed in the 1970s, my father jumped on the chance to get out of London to America because America for him was freedom. That's my reading of it.
Sara Buoso is an art-critic and curator. She holds a PhD in Art Theory and History, Central Saint Martins, London, specializing in photology and practices of light. She is a lecturer of Contemporary Art History at the Academy of Arts and New Technologies, Rome.
Donald Locke (17 September 1930 – 6 December 2010) was a Guyanese artist who created drawings, paintings and sculptures in a variety of media. He studied in the United Kingdom, and worked in Guyana and the United Kingdom before moving to the United States in 1979. He spent his last twenty years, perhaps the most productive and innovative period of his life, in Atlanta, Georgia.
Donald Locke photo: Tom W Meyer
Hew Locke, is a British sculptor and contemporary visual artist based in Brixton, London. In 2000 he won a Paul Hamlyn Award and the EAST international Award. He grew up in Guyana, but lived most of his adult life in London. In 2010 he was shortlisted for the Fourth plinth, Trafalgar Square, London. Locke has had several solo exhibitions in the UK and USA, and is regularly included in international exhibitions and Biennales. His works have been acquired by collections such as Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), Florida, The Tate gallery, London and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. In 2016, the National Portrait Gallery in London acquired a portrait of Locke by Nicholas Sinclair. In 2022 he became a member of The Royal Academy of Arts.
Hew Locke
Brenda Locke moved to the USA with Donald Locke in 1979 when he received the Guggenheim Fellowship. Since retiring from her firm, Faulkner Locke in 2020, Brenda has established Donald Locke’s archives, including an in-house space and additional custom-built studio for all the artist’s works and memorabilia. Benda has donated Donald Locke’s papers to Rose Library, Emory University, and the estate has sponsored an annual Donald Locke Research Award at the Library.
Brenda Locke
Sara Buoso
Upcoming exhibitions in 2024-2025
Donald Locke
Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta, Georgia
UK Touring Exhibition to Spike Island, Bristol, Camden Arts Centre, London and Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK
Hew Locke
The British Museum, London, UK