Sea Power

British artist Hew Locke’s works spring from an interest in power and its representations, and often reveal the ways in which authority perpetuates itself through symbols– whether in contemporary royal portraits or in 19th century share certificates. Assembled out of a rich imagery drawn from his travels and memories, Locke's sculptures and wall reliefs with their carnivalesque excess only serve to accentuate the malaise they seek to hide. They can often seem like festering rainforests, where layer upon layer of toy guns, plastic lizards and other junk invade and destabilise images of might.

Locke’s works are rich with historical references and the artist is especially interested in the early processes of globalisation and its links to 15th century European marine expeditions. Sea Power (2014) is a tapestry-like drawing on walls illustrating the intercontinental links forged by early explorers and seekers whose voyages on unknown seas left behind a world forever transformed by the encounter. Made with black cord and beads, Sea Power represents numerous such journeys through the image of Sao Gabriel, the ship in which Vasco da Gama led a Portuguese armada as it sailed into the coast of Malabar in 1498, inaugurating a short sea route to India and, with it, hundreds of years of colonial conquest of the Far East. Black bead necklaces drip from Locke’s monochrome illustration of this history like cobwebs in an old house, their decay perhaps suggesting that modernity and our present is the slow unraveling of a moment in the past.