Donald Locke solves the complex legacy of colonialism with uneasy intensity

Donald Locke’s art is not influenced by traditional concepts of art production and is difficult to fix. His unrestrained work has the uneasy intensity of an artist who moves seamlessly between mediums, choosing the artist that best suits his artistic goals.

Locke’s prolific output in the Fujis is now the subject of a survey conducted by Spike Island in Bristol, England. Titled “Forms of Resistance”, this expansive exhibition is organized in partnership with Ikon Gallery in Birmingham and Camden Art Center in London, focusing on the breadth of Rocker’s career with a special focus on his time in the UK. For much of the mid-1950s, he called his home in the UK before moving to the United States in 1979 until his death in 2010.

The show features over 80 works, featuring early biomorphic ceramics that draw inspiration from natural forms and human bodies, monochrome black paintings from the 1970s, collages from the 90s and later mixed media sculptures, as well as excerpts from his works and his personal photos.

Near the entrance to the exhibition are three black paintings that draw you into. The center title is cage (1976-79), there are two rectangular cuts in the canvas, with black fake fur covering the gaps and grids. The wing is 63 black squares (1978-79) and Barracuda 1 (1978), both have squares of black cloth that have been pasted on the canvas before being painted.

Around this time, when Locke lived in London, he began to practice from the socio-political context of his work rather than treating his artwork as formal research. The choice of color black in his “black painting” intends to solve the colonial conquest in the Caribbean, and the geometric structure of the work evokes the grim, structured structure of the plantation system.

Born in 1930, Locke was in Stewartville, Guyana (then British Guiana), Locke’s age of growth was influenced by growing up on two different sugar cane plantations. He once said their “ubiquity” once said that according to the exhibition text, “ruled the sky and life from beginning to end.” To prevent seasonal coastal floods in the region from damaging sugarcane crops, Dutch colonialists built a rigid system of canal and dams to protect their profits at all costs. Even after nearly 60 years since the country was independent from Britain, the landscape of Guyana and Locke’s canvas formed the geometric pattern of the village. The country name still carries the joy of the plantation that once stood there: Airy Hall, Belfield, Maria.

Locke was one of about one million people who migrated to the UK from the Windrush generation from 1948 to 1973. His teacher, Edward Rupert Burrowes, encouraged Locke to experiment at the Working People’s Art Class (WPAC) in Georgetown. His first love was pottery, which he studied under James Tower, an English potter at the Cotham Bath School of Art. The second gallery of the exhibition brings together sculptures from his career, from simple ships made in the early days to elaborate bottles and decorated with various debris, such as Reconstructed bottle with pearl #11 (Pearl of Mahalia)2008 ceramic armatures are covered with fur and decorated with pearl necklaces. This work has a certain sense of humor, symbolizing his later works, but does not fully reveal itself. Locke refuses to let everyone joke.

But Locke found that the art teachings at Bath Academy were dogmatic. As an early act of the rebellion, he resisted influence and attempted to create organic and experimental mixed media ceramics rather than symbolic works, developing a critical framework that addresses issues surrounding history and identity, adapts to modernist formalism, and incorporates indigenous cultural traditions. Around this, Locke began to engage in his “twin form”, from Twin form (1963), a stoneware similar to a double vase. The circular, sensual shapes reflect the body parts and fertility symbols reflect the new sculptural language he is developing.

While working in a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Edinburgh between 1959 and 1964, he contacted American artists Sheldon Kaganof, Dion Myers and Dave Cohen, who introduced him to the California Clay Movement. In the movement where priority over function, Locke discovered the free and unruly technology of ceramics that were more suitable for his style. He will soon start his “plantation series” and the last project he made in London before moving to the United States.

On Spike Island, the three sculptures in the series are: Plantation (1973), a small ceramic sculpture, separated by a steel armature, placed on a box covered with fur; Plantation K-140 (1974), tightly packed with sculptures in a stiff wooden box, divided into three groups of two red acrylic sheets; and Black box green surface – Black bird (1974), four cylindrical ceramic sculptures on top of dark green vinyl covered wood. Minimalist in nature, geometrically similar to sugar bars found in dense vegetation in the Caribbean. Artists once described these forms as metaphors of the system that conquered one group by another.

Nearby is one of the most powerful works of Locke’s British era: Empire Trophy (1972–1974), consisting of a six-foot-tall wooden cabinet that has been divided and filled with ceramic tank forms of different sizes, contained in various used objects such as trophy cups and candle holders. Locke describes cylinders as bullets, but their penis shapes give the sculptures a sexually driven presence. Locke’s handmade bullets recall the violence of the Empire while remembering victims of colonialism, as enslaved bold bodies are seen as possessions that can be derived, sexualized or destroyed. The tension between sex and violence, the sculptures clearly deprive identity, is troublesome.

Despite these artistic breakthroughs, Locke felt strangled in London and chose to move to the United States, and he found that the country was bound by a strict artistic tradition. The Guggenheim scholarship in 1979 allowed him to study sculpture at Arizona State University. Rock found that Arizona’s landscape and culture contrasted sharply with his native Georgetown and his London, but he accepted the geography represented by his 1979-81 series “Arizona Square: Environment with Fifteen Black Canvases.” To do this, Locke placed 15 black squares on desert dunes, with the noon sun shining on them and trying out the natural environment and form. (In the exhibition, a 35mm slide of these Arizona desert paintings, taken by Brenda Locke and Jim Cowlin, looping.)

By 1990, Rock moved to Atlanta, where he joined the community of other black artists, including Larry Walker, Kevin Cole, Radcliff Bailey and Kevin Sip. The exchange of thoughts and inspiration led him to conduct other forms of experimentation, such as his multi-layered collage. Bray Nancy’s Mark (1995), for example, the image found is characterized by a shrouded avatar without avatar, which is similar to the image of Sarah Baartman and Confederate soldiers-has been covered with a layer of black paint. On these compositions, he added red paint lines, similar to wood shells. Locke seems to say that no matter how much history we try to cover up, the wounds of history will continue to bleed.

Despite his serious social commentary, Locke still fills some of his works with humor and irony. Apollo vector victory (1993), for example, is a rough painting with images of Charles III, followed by the Prince of Wales, his young son William and Scarecrow in the field, and his sculpture photos. As a new face of the British monarchy in the 1990s (for some, it’s a pride for others), the two royals were one day leading the National Federation, the former British Colonial Society, including Guyana. Place photos of the guns above their heads, while the pipes found nearby resemble rifles. Locke’s painting highlights the ridiculousness of all this: a comic symbol of past days, a ghost of colonialism’s past attempts to take power in today’s world.

At the end of his life, Locke began to incorporate African-American vernacular art into his works with Caribbean mythology and various dispersed histories. companion Empire Trophy From decades ago, mixed media works in 2006 Empire Trophy 2: Billy Mick’s Cabinet Miller (Hernando’s Altar Cortez)– Review the convergence brought by colonialism with respect from longtime Locke supporters Bill Miller and Barbara Day Miller. The work includes the discovery of objects similar to African masks and spiritual amulets, such as those used in the Obeah ritual, recalling the various Caribbean religions, faiths of generations that combine indigenous elements of West Africa, Europe and the Caribbean. Through such forms and symbols, Locke criticizes the remnants of colonialism, its structure of power and its nuances, which suggests that the world today is a complex, layered chaos that is worthy of consideration but is to be gradually dismantled.