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Conversation
Hew Locke: Raw Materials 27
Dawn Adès*†
,
dawnadesemail@gmail.com
in conversation with Hew Locke‡
Abstract
Extracted from a conversation between Professor Dawn Adès FBA and artist Dr Hew Locke, in this essay Hew Locke discusses the historical backgrounds and personal experiences that went into the creation of his artwork Raw Materials 27. Acquired by the British Academy in 2024, and now hanging on its main staircase, the collaged work explores the colonial entanglements of Guyana, Hew Locke’s original homeland, and its post-colonial histories. From the foundation object of a share certificate, standing for 19th-century exploitation and mineral extraction, the discussion ranges from decay and appropriation to the potential for revival.
Keywords
artworkGuyanacolonialpost-colonial historyFigure 1.
Hew Locke, Raw Materials 27, British Academy Art Collections (2023). Photo: Abi Gowling.
Dawn Adès
Hew Locke’s Raw Materials 27 is the most ambitious acquisition we have made to date. This was made possible thanks to special funds from the British Academy and is a fitting sign of our commitment to making its home in Carlton House Terrace (CHT) a showcase for the best in contemporary British Art.
The Art Committee had drawn up a list of artists whose work we would like to acquire, headed by Hew. His Tate Britain Commission in the Duveen Galleries, The Procession (2022), and his extraordinary, haunting installation of suspended boats, Armada (2017–19), now in Tate’s collection, had convinced many in the British Academy that we should acquire a work, but also, it seemed, put his work way beyond the Art Committee’s modest budget. We were delighted when our budget was increased in order to help us pursue a potential purchase, and existing connections to Hew, through the Art Committee’s network, led to a thrilling series of visits to his studio.
There were three main bodies of work that we looked at—any or all of which would be wonderful in CHT, but they were very different, though all to do with his imaginative engagement with the operations and histories of colonialism, especially in the context of his native Guyana. Firstly there were the boats, the old model ships he restored, re-purposed and suspended from the ceiling, evoking the voyages of explorers, pirates, colonialists, slave traders; then there were the busts of royalty and aristocracy from the Victorian period that he adorned with regalia, talismans and insignia (the weight of colonialism); finally his most recent works, very difficult to define in terms of medium—he calls them ‘pieces’ in the conversation. These are hangings, made from a variety of materials, with images drawn from multiple sources, which Hew explains in the interview. These, it was immediately obvious, were the best suited in terms of scale. We were incredibly fortunate to be among the first to see this series of works, and the first to acquire one.
Figure 2.
Oral history interview of Hew Locke and Dawn Adès, held at the British Academy 8 April 2024. Photo: Sharon Messenger.
Shortly after deciding on Raw Materials 27, we recorded a conversation with Hew at Carlton House Terrace, from which the following text has been extracted.
Hew Locke
I’m an artist working in various different media. What to say about Raw Materials 27? It’s a piece, it’s a collage, patchwork piece, printed cotton, various different materials sewn together. I sometimes find it difficult to talk about these pieces because this is a very new piece of—a new direction for my practice. But then I look at it and I realise I’ve been doing this since forever. My practice generally tends to be collage. This is a sewn fabric piece. I’ve done these in the past, but this is a new development, because Raw Materials 27 is largely based on an image from a share certificate of the Manaus Improvements Company.
I should go back a bit further to explain how this work originated. In 2008, I was doing an exhibition in New York. I woke up one morning and Lehman Brothers had collapsed, the whole financial system collapsed. I came back to London a few days later not knowing what to do because the art world had collapsed, everything had gone. I didn’t know what to do. Then I suddenly thought, ‘You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to invest in dead companies.’
So I started to look at financial crises of the past, thinking not just about hubris, but about a whole bunch of complex issues. Raw Materials 27 could be seen as being critical, but it could also be seen as being about the fact that no matter how much we get knocked down as human beings, we keep coming back again and starting new businesses. This one is about regenerations of Manaus. Manaus existed because of the Brazilian rubber boom. Manaus is a major city on the Amazon. So, what you’re looking at here, behind all this fabric and colour, is actually the whole Amazon basin and its draining area. That includes Guyana, where I come from, in yellow, in a light-yellow colour.
The thing about Manaus and the rubber boom is that it didn’t last. It was a boom and bust. But great fortunes were made. Many indigenous people were exploited to get the rubber. Then the whole thing collapsed because plants were smuggled out to East Asia and Southeast Asia, and the whole thing changed, and rubber went somewhere else. So the Amazonian rubber boom guys didn’t have it all their own way. That’s what Raw Materials 27 is about, these many, many things. Essentially, you’re looking at a stitched and printed poem, a rambling poem talking about the past, talking about how the past infects the present. For example, the map of Guyana there, that’s controversial in some countries; there’s a border of dispute, let me rephrase that, border controversy, with Venezuela. From my point of view, there’s no dispute, but from Venezuela’s point of view, there is.
Guyana has also become an oil-producing country in the last three years, becoming one of the fastest growing economies in the world. I grew up in Guyana and, growing up in Guyana, we never could have imagined such a thing. We thought that the wealth of Guyana would come from the interior, from gold because Guyana was known for its gold. My grandfather was a gold prospector, and he went through all sorts of booms and busts. But now the oil is Guyana’s El Dorado. So that’s what Raw Materials 27 is talking about too.
All this is true, but I like to think that you don’t need to know all this to appreciate Raw Materials 27. If I made a piece of work where to understand you needed to have a book of instructions in front of you to appreciate something, then I’ve failed. You need to be able to look at something and appreciate it purely aesthetically, that’s fine. But you should also be curious to know what’s behind the project, what’s behind this particular piece of work. The broken-down house in the bottom left-hand corner and the top right-hand corner: these are broken-down images of a famous plantation house in Berbice, in Guyana. It’s a very old plantation house, and it’s collapsing completely. I hope that it may get restored at some point.
Figure 3.
Hew Locke, Raw Materials 27, British Academy Art Collections (2023). Photo: Abi Gowling.
So Raw Materials 27 is about the past slowly disappearing and the present coming into it as well. I suppose it’s my memories too. You have to imagine this plantation house rising up from the land there for a sugar planter. Guyana was a British colony, and the colony was about producing sugar for the mother country. This house is an icon in the landscape. In Guyana, most people live in a flat coastal area—in most parts of the country, the coastline is, on average, one metre below sea level. So these houses barely exist in Guyana. They are disappearing very fast and it’s understandable. Wood to repair these things is very expensive. When I was growing up, concrete houses were where rich people lived, now it’s flipped around, and concrete is cheaper. Wood is a lot more expensive unless you are near the logging areas where wood is a more reasonable price. As I understand it, these buildings are disappearing and it’s just how things go. In most European countries in the sixties it was ‘out with the old and in with the new’. What I’m talking about here is a natural cycle of things. I suppose I tell myself that because I’m sad to see them go, When I was about sixteen, or fifteen, years old, I suddenly realised in a blinding revelation what our culture was not: we didn’t have Carnival like Trinidad, we didn’t have reggae like Jamaica, but we had these buildings, and that was unique in the Caribbean. I went to other Caribbean places and I was surprised. I thought everywhere was like us. But Guyana is not in the hurricane zone, so the buildings could survive, and I can sit here and just smell what it’s like in the rainy season inside these houses.
The country was built by slaves and then subsequently indentured servants from India. That’s the background of the country, and the way I talk about this piece—I’m rambling, but the piece is a rambling piece of work! Even as I look at reproductions of the piece, it’s not a straightforward conversation. I can hop from one thing to another thing. When you look at the top of Raw Materials 27, there’s patchwork sewn all over the top. But if you look carefully, you’ll notice that one of the pieces of blue patchwork has a white design in it. That’s a fragment of the United Nations flag, which is represented elsewhere as well, in a tiny fragment. It’s to do with the fact that when in trouble, when in doubt, even though people have lots of issues with how the organisation is run, the United Nations is where you go and have a conversation.
At the bottom of Raw Materials 27 is a boat. The figure standing in it is a mythical type figure based on a Songye image from the Democratic Republic of Congo; the diamond-shaped patterns come from a Kuba design, and again, the Kuba traditional African figures. I’ve used Kuba patterns a lot: after I’ve used it so many times, it starts to look, to be honest, like medieval patterns for some reason! The boat itself is referring to trade. Trade is what Guyana was invented for, exploiting what you could from there and shipping it out. When I was a child, I would sit on the seawall in Guyana and looking at boats disappearing over the horizon and then arriving over the horizon. I knew that the breeze, which was cooling me down while I was watching this trade, was called the trade winds. They were called the trade winds specifically because that was what they were doing. Those trade winds were blowing ships from Africa to the Caribbean and to Guyana as part of the triangular trade, a triangular slave trade. So the boat in Raw Materials 27 is about the part of that history of trade and colonisation. The name Guyana means land of many waters. To get anywhere, you’d have to cross rivers, take ferries and so on. So the idea of boats is sort of inherent in my background.
I’m old enough to have been one of the last generation to travel to a new life by boat, by ship. This would’ve been back in the sixties. I came back here in the early seventies, again by boat, with what I subsequently discovered was the post-Windrush Generation, because the boat stopped in Jamaica to pick up people who were migrating to the UK. I think boats have got this real hold on me. I studied at Falmouth in Cornwall, and that was not by chance, by accident. I studied there because it was a harbour. And I could walk around, walk past the boats at night and smell a bit of engine oil, hear clinking or see the way the boats were lit up at night with minimal lighting. Quite a scene for me.
Then is there’s a mask in the top of Raw Materials 27. This mask is inspired by an Ife mask, but it is chopped out of a Nigerian share certificate, which I had painted in the past, so in a way we are back with Manaus and the rubber boom. Raw Materials 27 is talking about foreign parts, foreign countries, foreign situations, but it is made here, in this country. It’s about British history and my complicated story in it. So there are autobiographical aspects, to the work, but it’s autobiographical in order to look at the wider sense. There are political aspects to it, but it’s personal and it’s political in a wider sense of the word. So when I’m looking at this plantation house collapsing, as the path slowly disappears, I’m also thinking of how the land is. On the top right-hand corner of Raw Materials 27, there’s an image of the sea in Guyana. That photograph is taken from standing on the seawall. Without the seawall, the country would not exist. The seawall was built by slaves, and then reinforced years later, rebuilt.
Guyana is now in this interesting position where they have oil, but, as we know, oil is a fossil fuel problem. You need the money from the oil in Guyana to build more sea defences to protect you from the effects of fossil fuel. So Guyana is in this intriguing catch-22 situation where people protest against oil producers. I see it in a more complex way, because I see a country who, after being looked down upon for being the poor, weak person in South America, is now in a different situation and able to carry a bit of weight. So Guyana’s oil is offshore drilling, there are several platforms and it’s all being done by Exxon. It’s a very strange thing to hear a country you grew up in being described as potentially the next Dubai. That’s quite weird, extremely strange.
I should talk too about the indigenous influences in Guyana because Raw Materials 27 is about these as well. The figure, which as I said before, was inspired by a Songye carving from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But what’s happened is that it’s been turned into something else. It’s got the crown of silk flowers sewn on, which for me works as an Amerindian headdress. Behind this figure is another image—an Amerindian petroglyph. So the whole thing has changed and become something different. It’s become what the country is: a post-colonial society with multiple influences involved in it coming together, quite frankly, how London is. London is a mixed, complex jigsaw puzzle of cultures—similar to what Guyana is. This particular piece is more autobiographical than some of the other pieces from Raw Materials series, that’s for sure. But it’s important for people to understand that though this may seem as if it’s about foreign parts and not remotely relevant to a British scenario, this is not true, because Guyana exists because of Britain. We are the only English-speaking country in South America. So that makes it very unusual.
There are indigenous Wapishana languages in Guyana. They are under pressure as most indigenous things are. But I’m not an expert on indigenous languages. I just remember hearing some from when I was very young, hearing some people speak to each other, Amerindians speaking to each other and thinking ‘all right, so these guys have a language’. But the Amerindian and indigenous situation casts a big shadow over the whole country.
In Guyana the coastal strip of land, where 99 per cent of people live, is flat. That was where sugar cane was grown. It’s flat with a massive sky. To the Dutch, Guyana’s first colonisers, it would’ve seemed like a tropical version of where they came from. The land was built by the Dutch, or rather built by slaves, but the Dutch were driving this whole thing, and they did it by polarisation. They put up a seawall, and they put a dike behind the lands, about a couple miles inland, and then drained the land. To this day, the drainage system set up by the Dutch is still in operation, draining land.
But go thirty miles inland, you start to get into rainforest, and the landscape changes. Keep going further and the rainforest will eventually peter out and you end up in savanna, grassland. So it’s an intriguing landscape. And the sea, I should add, is brown. It’s not blue. This is to do with it being near the Orinoco Delta. All the silt from the Orinoco river comes to Guyana. And if not that, there are silts from the Amazon. The sea being brown means that the tourist industry is non-existent, unless you count ecotourism, which is a growing thing. People go inland to have a completely different experience, a rainforest experience rather than a beach experience. Yes, the land, it’s very similar to the Netherlands, very similar, that big sky.
It is also in place names. There’s still places called Polder, low-lying tracts of land: there’s a village called Black Bush Polder. The country is such that the names of villages reflect who was in charge at that time: the Kindred, the children, or Edinburgh Castle, which is a village. These are estates and villages with Dutch names. For me, growing up there, I didn’t see these names as being a different language. I saw them as being our own thing. So Mon Repos, which is obviously French, Plaisance, again French, and then there are all these names like Golden Grove, all these optimistic names. But what’s behind it is something maybe a bit dark. Some good friends of mine live in a village called Paradise. Bachelor’s Adventure—the names are quite extraordinary.
When I was at art school, I felt insecure about the fact that Colombia had gold—gold tumbaga figures, Mexico had the Maya, the Aztecs and so forth. How come? What do we have in Guyana? I wanted us to have a massive civilisation! I realised that pre-Colombian artifacts have been found, but ceramics, moulded heads, The thing is, it’s there, but it’s different from what you have in say, Central America. You’re not finding stone pyramids! We can get fixated on glorious, massive towering remains, which are extraordinary of course, but forget that not every civilisation has to be like that. The reason why Raw Materials 27 looks the way it looks, with a headdress made of silk flowers, is because I grew up with seeing Amerindian headdresses made of parrot feathers. Obviously not a good thing today, but this was part of my childhood, and was largely to do with the fact that both my parents were artists. And it wasn’t until I left the country that I realised the value of what I was taking for granted.
My father went to Edinburgh School of Art. That’s the reason why I was born in Edinburgh. Everybody’s work develops from personal experiences, past, present and what comes in future. For me, I’ll give you one example: when I was maybe about eight years old, maybe nine, I asked my father for a bow and arrow set for Christmas. And I wanted one like the ‘Indians’, I hasten to add Native Americans, but of course back in those days it was cowboys and Indians. I wanted a feather bonnet as well. Instead he brought me, gave me for Christmas, a Waiwai bow and arrows. One of them had steel tips, so he took that away, because they were dangerous! I was really quite disappointed. The Waiwai are a tribe who live down at the bottom of Guyana near the border with Brazil, and their territory is around that area. And the Waiwai are well known for their cultural artifacts, for their traditional craft skills and traditional artifacts—in Britain, many ethnographic collections will have Waiwai objects in them. But even looking back, I’d been brainwashed into thinking of romantic ideas, romantic western ideas from Westerns, romantic ideas of The West, romantic ideas of Native Americans, which are highly romanticised in the first place. So there are layers upon layers and layers. I remember looking down to a certain extent on this set of bow and arrows that I’d been given, but I’d been given something which you would put in a museum today. It actually worked, it was an extraordinary thing, it shot arrows right, hit the target. It was quite a thing.
What’s important to know about Raw Materials 27 and my work in general is that it’s made up of layers, physical layers and layers of meaning. And I make work which can be picked apart. I’m trying to make work, which people can come back to it again and again and again and see subtle little things in it. I almost didn’t want to do what I’m doing now, which is tell people exactly everything. But it was important to know about the United Nations flag for instance. Once you see that then, from that tiny fragment, because you know the image, you can build it up in your mind.
Raw Materials 27 has to work at a distance, but then you come in close and then you see how it’s made. For me, all my work to date has been about the process, about being able to see exactly how something is made, so it’s not hidden. It’s very much revealed. It works in two completely different levels. It works as one completed thing from a distance, and then you can go in and zoom in. I’m looking at an image of it here, talking about it, and I suddenly noticed a small fragment of fabric. This is one of the earliest prints of a piece of work of mine onto fabric. And there’s a piece from a series called How Do You Want Me? It shows me posing in costumes made of all sorts of stuff, brightly coloured stuff, toys, dolls, swords against a background. I had a fragment of this, which was a part of a lining of a coat and as a print of this photograph. It’s a tiny fragment of this at the top of Raw Materials 27. So this is not just a piece of work, but it’s also an archive of my work, the history of my work practice. It’s not just one thing, as I said: there are layers and layers of meaning.
Figure 4.
Installation by Crown Fine Art of Hew Locke’s Raw Materials 27, British Academy, June 2024. Photo: Dawn Ades.
I photographed the Manaus share certificate to produce as a piece of work. As the shares were expanded, blown up, all of a sudden you can see the small print. That’s really, really interesting, because you can see the story behind it, what’s going on, in the original documents—small print is small print. When you blow these things up and start to read, the whole story starts to be revealed. I should add that Manaus is a highly symbolic city because it was the centre of that rubber boom—Manaus and Belém. Manaus was the first or second city to be electrified in Brazil. So it was really important, and all this was down to rubber. Manaus had an opera house and Caruso sang there. On a personal level, I associate Manaus with the film called Fitzcarraldo, which has had a big impact on my practice. So Raw Materials 27 is the story of many things, many things.
The debate I had is what to cover up and what to reveal. And that becomes an aesthetic decision about revealing and covering up. The whole thing is a collage and a patchwork piece, but it’s also a painting—it’s done in a way of balancing the colour all over it. For me, quite post-impressionist in style and colour. I realised that the post-impressionists had a real impact on me and my practice. That’s despite this being an intrinsic thing, a thing which comes naturally without me trying to control it. I like the fact that that’s an unfashionable thing to do as well. I’m a big fan of unfashionable. If it’s unfashionable, that’s where you’ll find me.
Cite
DOI: 10.5871/jba/013.a17
Published on: 19 March 2025
Volume: 13
Issue: Issue 1
Article view count: 242
Article download count: 12
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© The author(s) 2025. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
Locke, H., with Adès, D. (2025), ‘Hew Locke: Raw Materials 27’, Journal of the British Academy, 13(1): a17 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/013.a17Crossref
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Received
October 2022
Accepted
May 2023
Published
July 2023
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