Europa

Hew Locke OBE RA

2007

Plastic, metal, fabric, and wood

Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston

Multidisciplinary artist Hew Locke (Born 1959 in Edinburgh, UK) explores individual and collective relationships to power, cultural memory, and migration. Much of his richly detailed work across media has addressed histories of British imperialism and its afterlives. Composed of toy magic wands and tiaras, plastic flowers and butterflies, and dripping plastic beads, Europa is a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II and highly representative of Locke’s practice, which often deconstructs iconographies of British imperial power through lush compositions. The artist spent his formative years in the then newly independent country of Guyana, a f