Art Funded by you

Souvenir 9 (Queen Victoria)

Hew Locke, 2019

Hew Locke, Souvenir 9 (Queen Victoria), 2019, Birmingham Museums Trust, Art Funded 2022
© Hew Locke. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2021

Souvenir 9 (Queen Victoria) is one of a series of sculptural pieces in which Hew Locke has taken original 19th-century ceramic busts of British royalty and dressed them up with medals and other regalia.  

The imagery is expressive of military power, imperial conquest and colonial acts of violence. Once covered in such dense trappings, Locke has said, the busts become ‘weighed down by the literal burden of history’. 

This work features a Parian-ware bust of Queen Victoria made by the Stoke-based company Copeland in 1868. Developed in the 1840s, Parian-ware porcelain was named after the white marble used for sculpture since antiquity. Many royal busts were made using the process and displayed in middle-class homes.  

In Souvenir 9, the bust is dressed in materials including rope, chains, coins and medals. On its forehead it displays a medal from the fourth Anglo-Ashanti war (1895-96), while the headdress carries an image of one of the ivory masks looted in the British sacking of Benin City, in southern Nigeria, in 1897.  

Locke was born in Edinburgh, but grew up in his father’s native country of Guyana, where he remembers seeing the statue of Queen Victoria that stands in front of the High Court in the capital, Georgetown. Now based in London, he works across a range of media, often exploring ideas around nation building and the after-effects of the past on the present day.  

Souvenir 9 is the first piece by Locke to join the collection at Birmingham Museums, where it will provide rich opportunities for the exploration of colonial histories and legacies. 

More information

Title of artwork, date

Souvenir 9 (Queen Victoria), 2019

Date supported

2021

Medium and material

Porcelain

Dimensions

44 x 27 cm

Grant

7500

Total cost

20000

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