British-Guyanese artist Hew Locke isn’t set in his old ways. Visitors to his Tate Britain Commission, The Procession, a sweeping immersive installation filling the central Duveen Galleries, are greeted with a bright and rambunctious parade of figures wearing wildly colorful masks and elaborate costumes; some bearing banners, others riding horses, or carrying drums. ‘It’s like nothing I’ve ever done before,’ says Locke. ‘People will come along, and they will be expecting boats.’

Locke, who is based between London and Cornwall, is best known for his models of cargo ships and maritime installations. In his solo exhibition, ‘Here’s the Thing’, at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, in 2019, Locke showed Armada (2019), an installation of 45 suspended sculptures of boats. Other works saw the artist elaborately embellishing aristocratic figures, and imagery with cowrie shells and beads critiqued governmental authority and the iconographies associated with sovereignty and nationhood.

As in his previous work, The Procession delves into themes of empire, trade, global finance, and oil. But it’s also influenced by current issues, from the climate emergency and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to the Black Lives Matter movement and the Syrian refugee crisis. His most ambitious project to date, it features a cast of 150 unique characters, each in a handcrafted costume. There are skull masks, fantastical millinery, flags bearing evidence of rising sea levels, drum skins printed with obsolete share certificates, animal-like headdresses, and recurring images of the Benin Bronzes. In this nuanced work that oscillates between joy and sorrow, celebration and mourning, some decorated faces bloom with flowers, while others appear to have been injured.

To profound effect, the piece alludes to world histories, movements, and events including the Russian and British Empires, the war in Afghanistan, Rastafari, Guyanese architecture, and the problematics of the sugar trade. Locke brings the past into the present. He looks around at today and asks, ‘How did we get here?’

Everything in the kaleidoscopic array of colored fabric, brass cutouts, embroidery, medallions, patchwork, and more, was handmade during the pandemic. ‘I was working with assistants at a distance,’ he says. ‘I didn’t see what they were doing. I would send people materials by post, and they’d be making in their little bedrooms. Then I got a studio that was big enough to work in, but Covid haunted the whole show.’

Born in Edinburgh in 1959, Locke lived in Guyana between the ages of five and 21. Both of his parents were artists – his mother, Leila Locke, was born in Britain and later took Guyanese citizenship; his father, Donald Locke, was from Guyana. After witnessing his parents’ career struggles, Locke initially did not want to pursue art. ‘I tried very, very hard not to be an artist,’ he laughs. What changed his trajectory was being taught by Guyanese painter and writer Stanley Greaves, one of the Caribbean’s most esteemed artists. ‘I was working on a still life. It was a hibiscus flower. All of a sudden, I realized that I wasn’t copying it anymore. I was creating this thing. It was a lightbulb moment.’

Locke then moved to England, where he studied for an MA in sculpture at the Royal College of Art in London, graduating in 1994. ‘I was in a squat studio in an abandoned hospital in Stockwell, in south London. That’s how I got a career,’ Locke remembers. Colleagues like Yinka Shonibare also worked from the same studio, but breaking through in the art world was especially difficult for artists of color. ‘Putting out exhibitions was tricky,’ he says. ‘The show which shifted things for me was in 1999. Me and some friends, amongst them Johannes Phokela, who’s South African, and Kimathi Donkor, who is British-Ghanaian, put on an exhibition at The Brunei Gallery at SOAS University of London. We realized that we had to make things happen for ourselves.’

The artist recalls the blinding success of the YBAs in the 1990s – the movement that propelled Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, and Sarah Lucas to stardom. Locke and others, such as Lubaina Himid and Denzil Forrester, were making work during this period, yet they were never part of the conversation. ‘There was a point in time when nobody was looking at us. The YBA thing: there was one issue with it – it was sucking up all of the oxygen.’ His time at Gasworks studios in south London, from 1997 to 2003, was pivotal in helping him to form his identity and interests. ‘That was where we sat down and thrashed out how we saw ourselves in the world and looked for a space we could fit into,’ he says.

Locke has always used his art to push forward discussions around the legacy of colonization. He has never been afraid to subvert symbols of power. In his series Restoration (2006), he digitally adorns the statue of the slave trader Edward Colston (1636–1721) – at the time situated in Bristol but toppled by protestors in 2020. From afar, the gold decorations look like jewelry and medallions, but up close, they are actually small replicas of skulls, skeletons, and slave ships – a comment on Colston’s dark source of wealth. For Artist and Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past, a group exhibition at Tate Britain in 2015, Locke made Tate (2015), a limited-edition work consisting of a motif of sugar cubes made from brass layered atop a bust of Henry Tate. The work spoke directly to Tate’s sugar business (although the museum was founded after the abolition of the slave trade, it benefited from its existence).

With The Procession, Locke has challenged both himself and his audience. He at first ‘denied the carnival thing’, because it can often get dismissed as just a ‘jump up and a dance up’, but he accepts that the notion of carnival is an integral part of the work. He recalls a famous etching of people dancing in the streets of Port of Spain, Trinidad. In it, the dancers seem to be terrifying the white people walking on the streets alongside the parade, which is an annual ceremony about the emancipation of African peoples from European rule. ‘What I tried to make is something attractive, colorful, and intriguing. People can just take it on a purely visual level. That’s up to them. Or they can go in deeper and say, “Hang on a second. What’s that costume there? What’s that drum skin about?”’