The crowd keeps coming, the full length of the Duveen Galleries in Tate Britain. Many on foot, some on horseback, some carried, one in a wheelchair. Men and women and children, little drummers, people in Dogon masks and mantillas, others wearing ferocious animal heads or looking like the Creature from the Black Lagoon. There are demons and skulls, conical penitential caps, fantastical millinery, faces covered in stars and others decorated with flowers, a child with an old man’s face, others who look like they have been ravaged by disease or injured by war. Heavily pregnant women, women in cubist cardboard skirts, delicate faces cut and folded and faceted from card, people with their arms spread like dancers, figures with flowers in their hair and women all in black and in upholstered skirts who might have stepped out of a Velázquez painting. We pass by guys in sharp suits, and others who might have stepped out of a ball, but besmirched from wading through a flood. It is a crazy journey, stilled the length of Tate Britain’s spine.
The Procession, Hew Locke’s 2022 Tate Britain Commission, is at times as joyful as it is filled with sorrows. By far the most accomplished, ambitious and fascinating work I have seen by the 62-year-old artist, the work includes around 150 figures, each one individuated and wearing a hand-sewn and crafted costume. The Procession roars the length of the gallery. Among much else, it shows what an artist of Locke’s ambition can achieve when given sufficient resources to work at full stretch.
