Tate Britain Commission 2022: Hew Locke, The Procession review – An overriding mood of unquenchable subversive energy

If you’re looking for the kind of underlying conceptual conceit we’ve come to expect from contemporary art, you may wonder if The Procession is much more than a wacky handmade parade of multifarious Caribbean references

Hew Locke’s work at The Tate (Joe Humprhys)

Hew Locke’s sculptural interrogations of Britain’s imperial past may be bang on the spirit of the still-smouldering Black Lives Matter moment. But there’s an elliptical, miniaturist finesse to the British-born, Guyana-raised artist’s work – even when it’s not physically small – a reluctance to make the obvious statement that made me wonder how he’d fare in Tate Britain’s massive Duveen Galleries. Classic Locke works such as Souvenirs, antique busts of long-dead royals, encrusted in gold jewellery referencing the colonial past or For Those in Peril on the Sea, a flotilla of miniature boats suspended in a church nave in Folkestone, go for the evocative association, rather than the bombastic overkill necessary to make an impact in these enormous spaces.

I needn’t have worried.

The first figures in The Procession, Locke’s installation for this year’s illustrious Tate Britain commission, have all the model-making intricacy and precise cultural referencing you’d expect: a group of fife and drum-playing children dancing towards the gallery’s enormous neo-classical entrance, decked out in clothes printed with the share certificates of long-obsolete colonial companies, sporting masks that draw on the forms of Guyana’s historic colonial architecture. But far from being models, they’re life-sized and followed by 145 more mostly adult figures parading through these august and sterile halls in an all-dancing, horse-riding, stilt-walking, flag-wielding bricolage of painted cardboard and patch-worked and silk-screened fabric. Locke and his apparently small team of assistants have clearly been very busy.