You have some work in the forthcoming exhibition at Tate Britain, Artist & Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past. Would it be fair to say that almost all of your work could have been part of that show?
Not necessarily. I mean, one of the problems with being an artist is people want to be able to say: “He’s the post-colonial guy”, or “He’s Mr Multicultural”. I have an interest in those issues but I think the work goes beyond that. I want to make art about what is happening today. I mean, we are sitting surrounded by a collection of model boats that I am working on for a show in New York. The boats may have some historical background, but they are also about what is happening now in the Mediterranean, what is happening with people trying to get from Haiti to the US. History is both now and in the past.
You were invited to make the centrepiece for the Magna Carta celebration at Runnymede earlier this year, which I guess also made that point?
Yes. The Jurors, 12 empty bronze chairs in the middle of a field. It is a very surreal thing. It was a celebration of this historical event, but also a reminder that the right to trial by jury is under threat. It goes back and forth. There are references in the decoration of the chairs both to some of the obvious current things – Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi – but also to Aboriginal prison trees and refugee boats of different times. We get caught up in these great currents of history, but we focus on the now. You know, we go into Afghanistan without ever really thinking: haven’t we been here before? If I wasn’t an artist, I always said I would be a historian.
The piece was unveiled at Runnymede by Prince William and you met the Queen. Given the series of voodoo-style representations of the royal family you have made over the years, that must have been an odd moment?
It was obviously strange, meeting the Queen. As I have said before, my opinion on her is neutral. It is neither royalist nor republican. All the images of the Queen I made came after 9/11. I homed in on this person who had been head of state for a very long time, but we don’t know any of her opinions. That fascinated me. Before the Iraq war started, “Queen and country” was in the air. I was drawing her and I came up with something in which she looked quite terrified. I started adding plastic Kalashnikovs and other things, because I had this sense of her meeting the prime minister every week and having her mind full of terrifying secrets.
Your late father, Donald Locke, also an artist, is represented in the Tate show too. What did he make of that work?
He has been dead for five years. We were very close. He got the images of the royal family, he understood it. My father is interesting, because the work he did in the 70s, which was quite influential on young black British artists in the 80s was this modernist work, a lot of black colour. I didn’t get it as a teenager. But I had the sense of it later as being about a black man in 70s Britain trying to get by. I’m not sure he thought of it like that, even. Sadly he’s not here to see [the exhibition] because otherwise, despite his diabetes, we’d be sitting here having a glass of rum.
Would you be in his studio when you were a kid?
To a certain extent. I spent more time, probably, in my mother’s studio. My mother was a painter. My father was black Guyanese, my mother white English, and we lived from when I was five in Guyana. When they split up, my father left to come back to England and I stayed back there with her. Both my parents were very good art teachers and the odd thing is that the one person they didn’t teach became the artist – that’s me. They taught lots of prodigies who gave up or fell by the wayside. I kept going.
I’m looking round here at these boats you are making. They have been a constant theme in your work. Why?
Here’s the thing: Guyana means “land of many waters” – you are constantly aware of boats. I went to Guyana as a five-year-old kid on a boat. I came back here on a boat. I went to Falmouth to study art based on the fact that it looked like something I knew. Every three years I would need, psychologically, to make a boat. The biggest one I made at the Royal College of Art in the 1990s was my degree show. I saw this model of the maharajah of Jaipur’s barge in the Science Museum. You can’t say why one thing means something to you. It’s that mix of politics and the personal that you are looking for, so that it flows in and out.
Where is home?
Well for me, home was Guyana, and the way I speak, my accent is Guyanese. It would embarrass me to lose it. Living here, it took many years for me to feel remotely anything like British. I came in the 1980s and it was quite fractured times. From the beginning, people would look at my work and say: “This is great.” And then: “Where do you come from?” What I always heard in that was: “You are not from here. You are not one of us”. That still lingers. Or people would say: “I love this! What festival have you made it for?” I understood why. But no one could see it as art; they assumed I was making stuff for a carnival.
Has that attitude shifted?
It has. People are more used to seeing art like mine, I suppose. But at the same time I think I have connected much more strongly back to the Caribbean. If you asked me that stupid question: “Who are you loyal to?”, I could be in a Cornish churchyard and I could really feel that Englishness. Or if I went back to Guyana, I would be there, mentally. Surviving as an artist in Guyana would be tricky. So I am where I am. But the question of home does come up. I guess it does increasingly for all of us.
Artist & Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past is at Tate Britain, London, from 25 November to 10 April 2016
