Phoebe Boswell is interested in the liminal space between our collective histories and imagined futures; how we see ourselves and each other, and, consequently, how we free ourselves, or imagine freedom. Her figurative and interdisciplinary practice adopts an errant, diasporic framework, moving intuitively across media from drawing and painting to film, video, sound, and writing, to create immersive installations which affect and are affected by the environments they occupy, by time, gestalt, the layering of sound, the serendipity of loops, and the presence of the audience. Often inviting the participation of volunteers to create a nuanced collective voice in the making process, Boswell’s work investigates themes including protest, reclamation, grief, intimacy, migration, the body and its world-making. Her recent work considers the dichotomy of bodies of water as both repositories of painful historical experience and sites of renewal and hope.
Boswell’s paintings, drawings, installations, and film & video works have been exhibited at galleries including Gagosian, Cristea Roberts Gallery, Dulwich Picture Gallery and Kettles Yard, and held in collections widely, including The British Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, RISD, the British Film Institute’s National Archive and the UK Government Art Collection. She was the Bridget Riley Drawing Fellow at the British School of Rome in 2019, received the Lumière Award from the Royal Photographic Society in 2021, the Paul Hamlyn Award in 2019, and the Future Generation Art Prize’s Special Prize in 2017. Boswell was Whitechapel Gallery’s 2022 writer in residence and has presented her writing at institutions including Tate Britain, Victoria & Albert Museum, The Ford Foundation, and Loophole of Retreat Venice. She has had institutional solos at Autograph ABP, New Art Exchange and the Goteborg Konsthall, and participated in the Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement (Switzerland), Prospect New Orleans, and the Lyon Biennale. Boswell was born in Nairobi, Kenya, and lives and works in London.
SELECTED WORKS
FOR WE TEACH LIFE, SIR (2024)
Wall drawing installation, featuring three framed pastel on paper drawings: this longing reveals its kernel (2024); the most penetrating preachers (2024); the smallest play of leaves in my branches, the smallest scar on my bark (2024)
Commissioned for Constellations group show, Gallery 1957, London
2024
