Fife Player

Hew Locke (b.1959, Edinburgh) lives and works in London. The son of English painter Leila Locke (née Chaplin) and Guyanese sculptor Donald Locke, he spent his formative years (1966-80) in Georgetown, Guyana, before returning to the UK to study at Falmouth University (BA Fine Art, 1988) and the Royal College of Art (MA Sculpture, 1994). He has exhibited extensively, including early commissions at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2000) and Chisenhale Gallery (2002), and recent commissions at Tate Britain, London, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (both 2022). He has curated the current exhibition at The British Museum Hew Locke: What Have We Here? (2024). In 2025, the Yale Centre for British Art, New Haven, will present a touring retrospective exhibition of his work. 

Over the past forty years, Locke’s practice has engaged with Europe’s colonial past and the cross-cultural circulation of artefacts, motifs, patterns and symbols that he combines in his drawings and assembles in his sculptures. Locke is best known as a sculptor, yet drawing features prominently in his sculpture and has been a constant part of his practice since his student drawings of Guyanese and Italian architecture. He has stated: ‘Drawing is, I suppose, the backbone of what I do; that is where it all comes from’. Specifically, he has explained the importance of imaginary drawing:

‘there are certain qualities that you can get from sitting down in front of a building and doing a graphite drawing. And that’s from life and drawing from life is good in a way, but there are limitations and the imagination is held in check. And there is the other type of drawing that I do which is me by myself in the studio and that’s the imaginary type of drawing, and that’s usually in pastel or charcoal’.

The Fife Player belongs to a group of Locke’s large charcoal and pastel drawings from 1997–1998 of single fantastical figures whose richly decorated clothes borrow from military uniforms and sumptuous garments. The figures’ postures and attires were inspired by figures of painters such as Diego Velázquez, William Hogarth and Francisco Goya, alongside Victorian illustrations. Their heads are often replaced with animal faces or skulls – a device used by Goya in his etchings Los Caprichos. A group of these large-scale drawings were exhibited in 1997 at Gasworks, London, at Locke’s solo exhibition Ferae Naturae – a Latin expression that refers to undomesticated animals. The untamedness and hybridity between the animal, the human and the supernatural are typical of carnival characters and their costumes – other references Locke explored in his drawings.

Following the exhibition Ferae Naturae, Locke completed a few related drawings of single figures, including Fife Player. The latter takes Édouard Manet’s Le Fifre (1866; Orsay Museum, Paris) as a starting point. This painting, in turn, was indebted to Velázquez’s Pablo de Valladolid (c.1635; Prado, Madrid), the portrait of a servant and entertainer at the Spanish royal court. Taking inspiration from Velázquez, Manet painted a fairly plain background and adopted solid areas of colour and few modelling effects to represent an ordinary, nameless child from the military band, but treating him as a grandee. Locke’s engagement with Manet’s Le Fifre was rooted in his liking of the pose and interest in the representation of power and powerlessness. Locke’s character shares with Manet’s young musician the same pose, similar attire and large eyes gazing dreamily while performing. However, in Locke, the head is shaped and adorned in an otherworldly manner, and the uniform is bedecked with patterns that provide a sense of rhythm and movement distinctive of the artist’s drawings. The patterns are based on Amerindian Timehri designs (petroglyphs realised by Guyana’s indigenous population in the pre-Columbian epoch) interspersed with imagined figures of a jaguar and a memento mori. The art historian Kobena Mercer convincingly discussed Locke’s choice and combination of sources as exploring early modern European ‘social fantasies of sovereignty’.

Locke’s imagery of artefacts and motifs circulated and dispersed during the Spanish and British Empires have become recurring and distinctive in the artist’s work across decades and featured prominently in his 2022 Tate Britain commission, The Procession, which was constituted by around 130 assembled figures led by a child playing the flute. The recurrence of this figure over twenty years later in such a prominent role is a testament to its importance in Locke’s pantheon of imaginary characters.

The artist; purchased by the Samuel Courtauld Trust, 2024.

Signature: Recto, lower right, artist's hand, signed and dated: HL98