Detail of Burke. Photo by Indra Khanna

Commissioned by Spike Island and first shown at St. Thomas the Martyr Church, Bristol

"But this three-dimensional treatment of the image also was about the idea of vandalising photography. So you get a photograph, you print it up, you mount it onto aluminium and MDF - you spend a lot of money doing this - and then you take a drill, drill holes into it and drill stuff onto it and just dangle and fix stuff all over it. It’s about attacking the preciousness of the photograph as well as the preciousness of the object that I’m actually proposing to cover.

"So it’s got to a stage now where the work has become about several things: it’s become about the statue, it’s become about covering the statue, but it’s also become about the photograph of the statue, covering that, and about the relationship between a flat two-dimensional photograph and a relief fixed onto that photograph. It’s about pushing the boundaries between sculpture and photography and trying to see how the two can mix together, how they fit together and do not fit together. It’s a bit like magnets which repel each other: asking what do you have to do to get this balance where they don’t repel each other but they work in harmony?"

- Edited extract of Hew Locke in conversation with Dr. Jon Wood of the Henry Moore Institute, from Drawing on Sculpture – Graphic Interventions on the Photographic Surface, Sculpture Journal volume 15.2, 2006.  

left; Edward VII, right; Colston, photos by Indra Khanna