ABOUT
"I have always had a fragile understanding of the definition of 'home'."
Underpinned by a transient and diasporic consciousness, Phoebe Boswell’s practice speaks from the porous space between here and there. She works intuitively across media, centering drawing but spanning animation, sound, video, writing, interactivity, performance and chorality. This tends to culminate in layered installations, which affect and are affected by the environments they occupy, by time, the serendipity of loops, and the presence of the audience. Aesthetics of figuration and representation through the radical imaginary of Black feminisms become tools for contemplating the body as world, worldmaking, rather than merely as object to be gazed at. Artmaking becomes a sensory and political act of service to community, where labour-intensive drawing practices, immersive technologies, and calls for collective participation denote a commitment of care for how we see ourselves and each other; how we grieve, how we love, how we rest, how we heal, how we protest, how we remember the past in order to imagine the future.
Phoebe Boswell (Kenya/UK) is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in London. She studied Painting at the Slade (2005) and 2D Animation at Central St Martins (2009) and her work has since been exhibited globally. Institutional solo exhibitions include The Space Between Things, Autograph ABP, London (2018-19), HERE, Goteborgs Konsthall, Gothenburg (2019), and Here, New Art Exchange, Nottingham (2021). She has shown with galleries including Kettle's Yard, Iniva, the Royal Academy, Kristin Hjellegjerde, Carroll / Fletcher, and Tiwani Contemporary; had solo presentations at art fairs Art15, 1:54, the Armory, Expo Chicago and Frieze NY Online; and has screened at Sundance, the London Film Festival, LA Film Festival, Blackstar, Underwire, British Animation Awards, and CinemAfrica amongst others. She participated in the Göteborg International Biennial of Contemporary Art 2015, the Biennial of Moving Images 2016 at the Centre d'Art Contemporain in Geneva, and received the Future Generation Art Prize's Special Prize in 2017, consequently exhibiting as part of the Collateral Events programme at the 57th Venice Biennale. In 2019 she was the Bridget Riley Drawing Fellow at the British School at Rome, she is a Ford Foundation Fellow, and is represented in the United States by Sapar Contemporary, New York. Boswell is one of the selected artists for the next iteration of Prospect New Orleans and her first public artwork PLATFORM (2020), commissioned and produced by the Fonds cantonal d'art contemporain, Geneva, for the Mire Program, was unveiled at Lancy-Bachet Railway Station in Geneva in July 2020. Boswell is a current recipient of the Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists, will this year present newly commissioned works at Prospect P5 in New Orleans and Hache Noce in Oaxaca, and has solo exhibitions at New Art Exchange, Nottingham and Sapar Contemporary, New York both opening in May (according to covid-19 guidelines). Her works are held in public and private collections, including the UK Government Art Collection and The Studio Museum, New York.
Info
Follow @PhoebeBoswell on twitter.
Follow @phoebe.boswell on instagram.
All images in this website are used with permission from the artist Phoebe Boswell.