Hew Locke

Hew: When you make a piece of work you see things one way - and the piece of work has a life of its own. So, how this work is perceived over time will change and evolve and that's how it should be, you know.

The idea of who these people are for me in The Procession should be timeless, because it needs to stretch beyond where we are now.

My name is Hew Locke, I'm an artist. Sometimes I'm a sculptor, sometimes I'm a painter, sometimes I'm in photography. I was born in Edinburgh and at the age of five I went to Guyana. And this would have been in the sixties - I arrived just in time for independence. So, I saw the flag being designed. We were allowed to stay up at night to watch the handover from the British to Guyanese government and that had quite an impact on me.

And it gave me a lifelong interest in how nations are formed and what they choose as their symbols of nationhood. And that has particular relevance to Britain and my approach to this country, and how we accept what our images are. And that could stretch on even to ideas of who the national heroes are of this country, you know. Who gets a statue and who doesn't get a statue. And all of this stuff then feeds into ideas of nationhood and it gives me inspiration in my particular practice.

My work is influenced by many things and autobiography is definitely one of them. I arrived in Guyana as a five year old kid. I went there by boat because that's what you did in those days. And that had a kind of I think a deep psychological impact on me, and I've been making boat sculptures over the years and I think it has a direct reference back to that journey.

In Armada there's nobody on these boats; they're empty of people but the people who are travelling on it is you and me. Our minds go into the boats and we imagine the journey that we might take on them. The name Guyana means land of many waters, and to get anywhere you'd have to go by boat.

So it's not surprising that boats are part of who I am. They're containers for people trying to get to a new life. They're containers for a journey through life, into death. There are others which have references to colonial issues to conquistadors chasing gold. Some others have references to the Mediterranean refugee crisis. Boats are a metaphor for life, basically.

The Procession is about certain universal concerns, and they will always be there. I'm trying to tackle some really big, wide subjects over centuries and how things affect us today. But it's talking about the echoes of history basically. What I'm trying to do is make something attractive - to draw people in. And people go - 'What's that? What's that mean? What's that?' And then start to question what the imagery is all about.

It's highly detailed and that's deliberate. So it will give reward to longer viewing. There is lots of little bits of evidence, lots of bits of hint. Lots of bits of clues The piece can be read as a sort of puzzle, you know. Which you can piece together. There's beauty there I would like to think but it's a complicated messy kind of beauty.

What I'm trying to do is create something which I personally find emotional and emotionally charged, and emotionally moving. I hope that people will actually feel that they're part of something. I wanted the work not to be raised up above people's heads, I realised that the work needed to be human scale. We need to identify with these figures even though they look strange and wearing weird masks, and stuff like that. We need to identify with them.

I think of The Procession as an epic poem. It's a bit like a kind of national collective unconscious, it becomes part of who we are. So the material I use are quite contrasty. Some are quite golden and flamboyant, and some is quite rough. This is all deliberate. This is because I want different feels running through the whole thing. It looks as if it's got a history to it. It has some age to it.

I've been using cardboard for many years now. It's a warm material, it's a material we know. We understand it. As kids we get into cardboard boxes and they become boats, they become cars. It has a resonance beyond many other materials. It folds and bends in a particular way. But also conceptually, cardboard is interesting. It's very, very useful but then it's throwaway at the same time. It's a disposable thing.

What was also crucial to this project was figuring out that I could have my own custom made fabric. That made all the difference. So fabric which I was printing myself, but also fabric which I was buying at fabric shops dotted around London. I make work which there's a lot of difficulty in it, maybe defiance, maybe conflict, but it's about hope you know - It's essential. We can't survive without it. We drown without it and what's happening in the Duveen Hall is not a negative movement of people - it's a positive movement of people.

They're moving into another life, you know. They may be coming from difficult times, they may be heading through difficult times. But there's an energy there, which is about hope. The future. Let's make something positive.