The Procession at Tate Britain
(Picture: Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures Ltd)A horde is marching through Tate Britain. Men, women, children, skeletons, all many-coloured (I mean like pink and green; camo and leopard-print), some on horseback, some carrying instruments or stranger things, they fill the space, silent but evoking clamour, static but somehow surging forwards, towards - what, the future? The river outside and the far-flung places it leads?
This is The Procession, the latest large-scale artwork to be created for the prestigious Tate Britain Commission (previous noteworthy iterations include Martin Creed’s Work no. 850 in 2008, in which a group of people sprinted through the galleries ‘as if their life depended on it’, and Fiona Banner’s Harrier and Jaguar in 2010, for which the artist suspended a fighter plane nose down from the galleries’ vaulted ceiling). The artist, Hew Locke, has been working on the piece with his studio team pretty much solidly for over a year, hunkering through lockdowns to painstakingly craft every life-sized figure by hand.
