Stop tearing down controversial statues, says British-Guyanan artist Hew Locke

When Hew Locke was growing up in Guyana, he would pass by the statue of Queen Victoria in front of Georgetown’s law courts. Henry Richard Hope-Pinker’s 1894 statue had been commissioned to mark the monarch’s golden jubilee, but not long after Guyana became independent from British rule in 1970, the statue was beheaded and the remains thrown into bushes in the botanical gardens.

‘I remember being shocked that such a sacrilegious thing could happen,’ says the Edinburgh-born, Guyana-raised, London-based 62-year-old artist. ‘It set me thinking about what public statues are for. Who are these people? How come we pass by them without noticing every day?’

Half a century later and thousands of miles away, Locke is still thinking about these questions. We’re standing beneath another statue of Victoria, in Birmingham, between Joseph Chamberlain’s Italianate Council House and the Parthenon-replica Town Hall.

Thomas Brock’s 1901 marble figure was erected here 12 days before Victoria’s death in 1901. In 1951, to mark the Festival of Britain, a bronze cast by William Bloye and members of the Birmingham School of Art replaced it. Now, in 2022, Hew Locke is giving Queen Victoria a yet more extreme makeover. He hasn’t chopped off Victoria’s head. Neither has he emulated other destroyers of statuary such as the Baghdad weightlifter who took a sledgehammer to the giant statue of Saddam Hussein in 2003, the Ukrainians who, during the so-called Leninfall of 2014, pulled down 320 statues of Lenin, or the Bristolians who in 2020 threw slave-trader Edward Colston’s statue into the dock.

Instead, Locke has tried something more subtly provoking. He has wrapped the existing statue of Victoria with a wooden ship as if she is about to set sail on a world tour.

Locke has given her five shipmates in the form of queenly mini-mes, each cast in patinated bronze.