Twin Form 1976 is a small, black, editioned ceramic sculpture by the Black British artist Donald Locke which follows on from earlier ceramic bipartite works such as
Folded Seed with Clip 1972–4, also in Tate’s collection (Tate L04344). Locke started working on his ‘twin forms’ around 1969 and continued them into the late 1980s. These bodily, sensual works were essentially biomorphic in character and allude to female sexual organs. Such works are representative of Locke’s early and lasting commitment to pottery in the creation of sculpture rather than as functional objects. These organic and bodily forms were important to Locke’s sculptural language as emerging from an understanding of modernity as a shared imaginative terrain of both the non-Western and the Western traditions. Locke drew inspiration equally from ancient sculpture, such as the Nigerian brass Ife Head (British Museum, London), and from contemporary vessels, as in the case of the work of the Nigerian potter Ladi Kwali (1930–1984). In the 1970s Locke gained a growing recognition for his ceramic work and, in 1972, he was invited to exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London in the
International Exhibition of Ceramics.
In 1989, in the exhibition
The Other Story, Locke exhibited three organic ceramic sculptures alongside his major work
Trophies of Empire 1972–4, also in Tate’s collection (Tate
T14319). The play of duality suggested by this juxtaposition – between violence and fertility, or human and biomorphic forms – allows for a shifting symbolism that has been discussed as challenging stereotypes of both imperial occupiers and exploited native, enslaved or colonised people. For artist and curator of
The Other Story Rasheed Araeen (born 1935), Locke’s work addresses sexual exchanges within the power-shaped social dynamics of the historical time and alludes to colonialism and slavery (Rasheed Araeen, ‘The Other Story: Recovering Cultural Metaphors’, in
The Other Story, exhibition catalogue, Hayward Gallery, London 1989, p.90).
Despite his commitment to ceramics and, later, to casting bronze, Locke worked in all sorts of materials, drawing, painting and sculpting in a variety of mediums (see Tate L04344–54,
T15769, T14319). Interested in exploring different materials and forms, after moving to London in 1971, Locke entered into a phase of open-ended experimentation, accepting no procedural or technical limitations and imperatives on his work (Locke 2011, pp.31 and 63). Locke had studied art in Georgetown, Guyana under Edward Rupert Burrowes (1903–1966). In 1954, through a British Council Scholarship, he went to study ceramics at Bath School of Art and Design in Britain, where he was taught painting by William Scott and Bryan Winter, sculpture by Kenneth Armitage and Bernard Meadows, and pottery by James Tower, one of the first potters to use plaster rather than the two most traditional methods, the potter’s wheel and coiling. Between 1959 and 1963, supported by a Guyanese government scholarship, Locke pursued further education at the Edinburgh School of Art. There he was taught by Sheldon Kaganoff (a pupil of Peter Voulkos, one of the leading artists who established the California Clay Movement in the 1950s and a lecturer in Edinburgh between 1962–5) and also met other artists committed to the expressive possibilities of clay as an artform (such as Dave Cohen and Dion Myers). Nonetheless, Locke was frustrated by the way in which work in ceramics was discussed by most practitioners and critics, applying criteria relating to a rigid and often ideological understanding rooted in a very specific and narrow technical tradition.
Writing in 2004, Locke explained that in the past he had been concerned by the fact that his sculpture, painting and work in other mediums seemed to emerge out of radically different stylistic approaches. This troubled him because it contrasted with the widely held view that an artist’s significance depended on consistency of style, medium and subject matter. He later came to realise that his work had always been preoccupied with, and had emerged from, the background of ‘Creole’ America’. Locke wrote: ‘In retrospect, it appears that the work has always been trying to encompass and bend to the will of the imagination, every aspect of the life and experience of Black people in the New World – the landscapes they inhabit, their physical uniqueness, the folk-lore and myths which crowd their imagination, and the socio-economic legacies they inherited from the past.’ (Donald Locke, ‘Artist’s Statement’, Atlanta, April 2004, included in the press release for his solo exhibition at Skoto Gallery, New York, 2004,
https://www.skotogallery.com/viewer/home/donald.locke.release.asd, accessed 28 October 2019.)
Locke described his artistic journey as being concerned with a desire to give form and visibility to the unique contribution of Black culture to modern civilisation. He discussed the Black experience as follows: ‘Perhaps unique in the history of mankind, the Black man in the New World has been coerced in a harrowing agenda, the crossing of thousands of miles of cultural time in space of a few short generations. He has moved from captive African to slave, to free citizen of the New World, precariously clothed in a hybrid ethnicity, a “creole culture”.’ (Locke, ‘Artist’s Statement’, 2004, accessed 28 October 2019.) As Locke suggested, the range of different materials and stylistic approaches he adopted, and the different themes he explored in his work, can be discussed in terms of the hybridity and plurality of Black culture across the Americas and in terms of the contribution of different cultural strands, particularly the African component, to the plural character of modernity.
Twin Forms 1976 exists in an edition of five, of which Tate’s copy is number two.
