Donald Locke Tackled Colonialism’s Complicated Legacy With Restless Intensity

Unbounded by conventional concepts of art-making, Donald Locke’s art is hard to pin down. His unrestrained creations have the restless intensity of an artist who seamlessly moved between mediums, choosing what best suited his artistic aims. 

Locke’s prolific output across fivedecades is now the subject of a survey at Spike Island in Bristol, England. Organized in collaboration with Ikon Gallery in Birmingham and the Camden Art Centre in London, this expansive exhibition, titled “Resistant Forms,” looks at the breadth of Locke’s career, with special attention to his time in the UK. For much of the much of the 1950s through the mid-’70s, he called the UK home, before moving to the US in 1979, where he would remain until his death in 2010.

Featuring over 80 works, the show features early biomorphic ceramics that draw inspiration from natural forms and the human body, monochromatic black paintings from the 1970s, collage paintings from the ’90s, and his later mixed-media sculptures, as well as excerpts from his writings and his personal photographs.

Near the exhibition’s entrance are the three black paintings that draw you in. The center one, titled The Cage (1976–79), has two rectangular cuts in the canvas, with black fake fur covering the gap and grids on top of it. Flanking it are 63 Black Squares (1978–79) and Barracoon 1 (1978), both of which feature squares of black cloth that have been tacked onto the canvas before being painted over.

Around this time, while living in London, Locke began to approach his practice from the sociopolitical context in which he was working rather than seeing his artworks as simply formal studies. The choice of the color black in his “Black Paintings” intentionally addresses colonial subjugation in the Caribbean, the works’ geometric structures evoking the austere, structured architecture of the plantation system.

Born in 1930 in Stewartville, Guyana (then British Guiana), Locke’s formative years were influenced by growing up on two different sugarcane plantations. Their “pervasive presence,” he once said, according to an exhibition text, “dominated the sky and your life from beginning to the end.” To prevent the area’s seasonal coastal flooding from damaging the sugarcane crops, Dutch colonialists built a gridlocked system of canals and dams to protect their profits at all costs. The geometric patterns that dot Guyana’s landscape—and Locke’s canvases—continue to structure its villages even today, nearly 60 years after the country’s independence from Britain. The village names still bear those of the plantations that once stood there: Airy Hall, Belfield, Maria’s Delight.

Locke was one of the estimated half a million people who migrated from the Caribbean to the UK as part of the Windrush Generation from 1948 to 1973. His teacher Edward Rupert Burrowes encouraged Locke to experiment in the classes he took at the Working People’s Art Class (WPAC) in Georgetown. His first love was pottery, which he studied under British ceramicist James Tower at Bath Academy of Art in Corsham. The exhibition’s second gallery brings together sculptures from across his career from the simple vessels made early on to elaborate bottle forms decorated with sundry items, like The Reconstructed Bottle with Pearls #11 (Pearls for Mahalia), a 2008 ceramic armature covered with fur and embellished with a pearl necklace. There’s a certain humor to this work, emblematic of his later works, that doesn’t quite reveal itself. Locke refuses to let everyone in on the joke.

But Locke found the artistic teachings at Bath Academy to be dogmatic. As an early act of rebellion, he resisted the influences and sought to create organic and experimental mixed-media ceramics rather than figurative works, developing a critical framework that addressed issues surrounding history and identity, accommodated modernism’s formalism, and blended Indigenous cultural traditions. Around this, Locke began working on his “twin forms,” starting with Twin Form (1963), a stoneware object resembling a double vase. The rounded, sensual shapes mirroring body parts and symbols of fertility reflected the new sculptural language he was developing.

While working on a master’s in fine art at the University of Edinburgh between 1959 and 1964, he came into contact with American artists Sheldon Kaganof, Dion Myers, and Dave Cohen, who introduced him to the California Clay Movement. In that movement, which prioritized form over function, Locke found the free-spirited and ruleless technique to ceramics more suited to his style. He would soon start on his “Plantation Series,” the last project he made in London before moving to the US.

On view at Spike Island are three sculptures from that series: Plantation Piece (1973), small ceramic sculptures separated by a steel armature resting atop a box covered in fur; Plantation K-140 (1974), tightly packed sculptures in a gridlocked wooden box, divided into three groups by two red acrylic sheets; and Black Box with Green Surface – Blackbirds (1974), four cylinder-shaped ceramic sculptures on top of a dark green vinyl-covered wood. Minimalist in nature, the geometric structures resemble sugar canes found in the densely packed vegetations in the Caribbean. The artist once described the forms as metaphors for the system that kept one group in economic and political subjugation by another group.

Nearby is one of Locke’s most powerful works from his British period: Trophies of Empire (1972–1974), consisting of a six-foot-tall wooden cabinet that has been partitioned and filled with differently sized ceramic cylinder forms, contained within a variety of second-hand objects like trophy cups and candle holders. Locke described the cylinders as bullets, but their phallic shapes give the sculpture a sexually charged presence. Locke’s hand-made bullets recall the violence of empire while also remembering the victims of colonialism as enslaved Black bodies were seen as property to profit from, sexualize, or depose. The tension between sex and violence, with the sculptures standing starkly plain and stripped of identity, is haunting.

Despite these artistic breakthroughs, Locke felt stifled in London, opting to move to the US, a country he found less bound by strict artistic traditions. A 1979 Guggenheim Fellowship allowed him to study sculpture at Arizona State University. Locke found the Arizona landscape and culture a sharp contrast to his native Georgetown and his adopted London, but he embraced its geography, as evinced by his 1979–81 series “Arizona Squares: An Environment with Fifteen Black Canvases.” For it, Locke laid 15 black squares on desert dunes with the midday sun shining on them, experimenting with the natural environment and form. (In the exhibition, a 35mm slideshow of these Arizona desert paintings, photographed by Brenda Locke and Jim Cowlin, plays on loop.)

By 1990, Locke had moved to Atlanta where he joined a community of other Black artists, including Larry Walker, Kevin Cole, Radcliffe Bailey, and Kevin Sipp. The exchange of ideas and inspiration led him to other forms of experimentation, like his multilayered collage paintings. The Mark of Brer Nancy (1995), for example, features found images—a caged headless figure whose voluptuous shape resembles Sarah Baartman and images of Confederate soldiers—that have been covered with layers of black paint. Atop these compositions, he has added lines of red paint that resemble lanced gashes. The wounds of history continue to bleed no matter how much we try to cover them up, Locke seems to say. 

Despite the seriousness of his social commentary, Locke still imbued some of his works with humor and satire. The Triumph of Apollo Vector (1993), for example, is a rough-hewn painting with found images of Charles III, then the Prince of Wales, and his young son William alongside scarecrow figures in the field and photos of his sculptures. As the new faces of the British monarchy in the ’90s—archaic to some, a source of pride to others—these two royals are one day to lead the Commonwealth of Nations, the association of ex-British colonies that includes Guyana. A photo of a gun is placed above their heads, while a found pipe nearby resembles a rifle. Locke’s painting highlights the absurdity of it all: comical symbols of bygone days, the ghost of colonialism’s past trying to hold on to power in today’s world.

Toward the end of his life, Locke began incorporating African American vernacular art alongside Caribbean mythology and various diasporic histories into his works. A companion piece to Trophies of Empire from decades earlier, the 2006 mixed-media piece Trophies of Empire 2: The Cabinet of Billy Mick Miller (Altar Piece of Hernando Cortez)—named in homage to Bill Miller and Barbara Day Miller, longtime supporters of Locke—examines the syncretism that colonialism brought forth. The work includes found objects resembling African masks and spiritual talismans like those used in Obeah ceremonies, recalling the various Caribbean religions that combine West African, European, and Indigenous Caribbean elements, intertwining beliefs for generations. Through forms and symbols like these, Locke critiqued the remnants of colonialism, its power structures, and its nuances, suggesting that the world today is a complicated, layered mess that’s worth not only contemplating but dismantling piece by piece.