Hew Locke RA (b. Edinburgh, UK, 1959) is a Guyanese-British artist. He spent his formative years (1966-80) in Guyana before returning to the UK to complete an MA in sculpture at the Royal College of Art (1994). He was elected a member of the Royal Academy of Arts in 2022.

Locke’s practice explores the languages of colonial and post-colonial power, how different cultures fashion their identities through visual symbols of authority, and how these representations are altered by the passage of time. These explorations have led Locke to a wide range of subject matters, images and media, assembling sources across time and space in his deeply layered artworks.

Across his work, Locke’s ability to fuse existing material and historic sources with his own political or cultural concerns, whether via visual juxtapositions or through the re-working of a pre-existing object or photograph, leads to witty and innovative amalgamations of history and modernity. This layering of time is accompanied by a unique merging of influences from the artist’s native Guyana and London, where Locke lives and works, leading to richly textured, visually vibrant pieces that stand on a crossroad of histories, cultures and media.

‘The Ambassadors' (2021) are a series of four Black figures on horseback. Two men and two women, they appear to be emissaries in a post-apocalyptic world, looking like bronze statues which have been adorned, each layered with colonial histories. The mixture of references and imagery comes from growing up in Guyana, where there was a mixture of cultures.

Many historic Caribbean figures have no contemporaneous images depicting them, as they were not in charge. This piece is an attempt to fill the resultant historical voids, and as such references many events and personages from Caribbean history.

'Ambassador 4' depicts a woman all in black, the only figure to be devoid of colour, Locke wanted to create contrast to the more colourful works. Her armour is a reference to Samuri armour constructed of his trademark cardboard, made to look like lacquer. The floral motifs represent specific flowers from the Victorian code, the Language of Flowers, signalling various ideas around the theme of Justice. Her exaggerated turban references Lock's first sight as a teenager of Rastafarians - which was a radical and revolutionary statement in the 1970s in the Caribbean.

This ambassador carries many narratives from the past into the future.