Hew Locke has shopped in markets all over the world but his local is still his favourite. "Brixton market is the centre of my universe," he says. "I get withdrawal symptoms if I miss a few weeks."  Locke's tiny attic flat has vividly painted walls (an acid yellowish-green in the sitting/dining/work room, pink in the kitchen) and some evidence of his booty: a set of Indian hair slides that inspired some of his early work; bookshelves housing a collection of brightly coloured tin toys and model cars he bought at a street market in Amsterdam. There are family snapshots and a framed collection of Guyanese stamps he has had since he was a child (he grew up in Guyana) and which remind him of the country's history.  "As a child I was always collecting things," Locke explains. "Then it got more intense with coming to live over here and being cut off from the past." (He arrived in Britain, alone, when he was 21, to study printmaking at Falmouth art college.)  A large loft is jammed with objets trouvés which Locke and his wife, Indra Khanna, rotate in and out of storage every few months. In addition there's a separate studio, which is so full of Locke's market plunder, heaped in endless bin bags, that there's only one clear wall.  The contents of the bags is surprising: piles of tacky cake decorations, gaudy trimmings, cheap toys and plastic flowers - the stuff of Locke's current work. "In recent years [I've developed] more of an appreciation of cheap, poor materials," he says, "and my work is about taking them and making them into something that is not kitsch. My work is treading this fine line between kitsch and something quite serious."  Take the Menace To Society series, which consists of four sculpted figures made entirely from plastic dolls, artificial flowers and other decorative ephemera picked up at Brixton market and various pound stores. From a distance, they look like carnival dolls, but get up close and you find something altogether more sinister. Tiny faces peer out from deep inside the bright, nylon hair. Plastic guns, some of them with labels saying "Made In England" or "Checked For Quality", poke out from beneath the flowers. The almost life-size figure Yellow Menace (the biggest and most human of the series) has a pair of huge, teddy bear eyes, underneath which are teardrops made from plastic figurines of babies.  "The figures started off as a response to the worry about Yardie gangs and the war in Sierra Leone," Locke says. "All that worry about gun crime and boy soldiers travelling around with British weapons. But they're also about the idea of real and imagined fear."  Locke was born in Edinburgh in 1959 to an English mother and Guyanese father. When he was six, the family moved to Guyana which was then firmly immersed in British colonial culture. Locke's school textbooks bore images of the Queen and anyone who dared deface her by adding a beard or a pair of glasses was severely punished. Running parallel with this colonial fervour were homegrown traditions such as cumfa, the local form of voodoo.  Locke left Guyana 24 years ago but his cultural history is evident in all his work. There's the voodoo-style Menace To Society series. There's a giant cardboard boat, Hemmed In (exhibited at the V&A in 2001), a response to his work being seen as imported, rather than British, art.  And then there's the royal stuff. Lots and lots of royal stuff, including the portrait of Princess Diana which is currently hanging in his living room. England's Rose is a 3ft 6in collage head made of brown craft paper, beads, sequins, plastic ballerinas of the kind more usually found atop little girls' birthday cakes and rather a lot of tiny toy guns.  It's beautifully decorative but if you look beyond the colour you find that, like all Locke's work, it is full of ambiguities. Ardent royalists could interpret it as a homage to Diana (all the sparkly glitter referring to her beauty, the guns referencing her work with landmines and the speculation of ill-treatment by the royal family). Republicans, on the other hand, could easily translate the piece as an attack on the institution of monarchy.  "I do like the idea that if you're a royalist you'll find it interesting, and if you're a dyed-in-the-wool republican you'll find it interesting, too," he says. "That's what it's about. This ambivalent, ambiguous take on it, rather than anything extreme."  Extreme is what you would expect. Contemporary artists aren't meant to like the royal family and black contemporary artists who grew up in the Queen's colonies are meant to loathe them.  "People ask me why I'm working on pictures of the royal family," Locke says. "They expect me to be angry, but I don't see the point. If you're going to fight in Iraq, then you're going to fight for Queen and country. When you hand in your passport, you see that you are in fact a subject of the Queen. My work is a weird kind of acceptance of that situation."  What is unambivalent in Locke's work is his use of colour - it seems to be instinctive. There is nothing taupe in the bin bags in the studio and the colour decisions in the flat were made without the use of endless tester pots. Locke admits the acid yellowish-green is a "weird choice" for a living room, but it works in the bright, attic-like space and is the perfect foil to the sweet pink of the kitchen.  "Colour is very important," he says. "I walk around with this imaginary palette in my head and when I see things, I know they're right. I did stop working in colour for a number of years because I was getting some weird stereotypes and labels - people were asking, 'What festival are you doing that for?' The Menace To Society series marks a return to working in colour."  · Boys Who Sew, an exhibition exploring how seven male artists confound traditions of textile art, is at the Crafts Council Gallery, London N1, from February 5 to April 4, 020-7278 7700 (craftscouncil.org.uk).
Gaudy cake decorations and plastic dolls, the ephemera of pound stores and market stalls - these are the stuff of artist Hew Locke's collage sculptures. His Brixton flat has a similar rebelliousness, writes Charlotte Abrahams.