Multidisciplinary artist Hew Locke explores individual and collective relationships to power, cultural memory, and migration. Much of his richly detailed work across media has addressed histories of British imperialism and its afterlives. Composed of toy magic wands and tiaras, plastic flowers and butterflies, and dripping plastic beads, Europa is a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II and highly representative of Locke’s practice, which often deconstructs iconographies of British imperial power through lush compositions.
The artist spent his formative years in the then newly independent country of Guyana, a former British colony, where images of Queen Elizabeth II were frequently reproduced in schoolbooks. He recalls being scolded by teachers for defacing images of the Queen when caught doodling mustaches or spectacles on her image. This playful spirit of critique endures in his practice through his ongoing series of collaged object portraits, such as Europa. In this raucous and colorful composition that is both celebratory and disquieting, Locke offers a grotesque and captivating portrait of the former Queen as what critic and curator Kris Kuramitsu has described as a “fragmentary postcolonial subject.” Indeed, Locke has emphasized that these object portraits would not have been possible before globalization—the ubiquity and cheapness of the plastic toys and tchotchkes that compose the Queen’s visage, are made possible by the same global flows of capital that European colonialism inaugurated.