Phoebe Boswell's figurative and interdisciplinary practice denotes a commitment of care for how we see ourselves and each other. Her work explores notions of freedom - protest, grief, intimacy, migration, love, the body and its world-making, using auto/biographical stories as catalysts to contest histories and imagine futures. Working intuitively across media, she creates immersive installations which affect and are affected by the environments they occupy, by time, gestalt, the serendipity of loops, and the presence of the audience.
In the new large-scale pastel on paper works, Boswell's figures linger in the liminal space between land and sea. In an ongoing exploration into the dichotomy of water, where histories of migration, both traumatic and liberating, exist within the ebb and flow, surge and swell of the ocean, the artist posits this porous border of the beach as a site of both memory and possibility; hauntology and hope. Boswell's gestural works, where charcoal becomes skin, chalk becomes light, a sweep of blue becomes sea and the white paper becomes sand, reclaim this in-between place as a site for remembrance and possible renewal – a healing, holding place.
Phoebe Boswell was born in 1982 in Nairobi. She studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London, where she currently lives and works.
Boswell has been awarded the Lumière Award of theRoyal Photographic Society (2021) | Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists (2020) | Bridget Riley Fellowship, British School at Rome (2019) | Ford Foundation Fellowship (2017) | Future Generation Art Prize, Kiev (2017).
Notable solo exhibitions include Orleans House, Twickenham, UK (2023) and Goteborgs Konsthall, SE (2019).
She was part of the 16th Lyon Biennial, FR in 2022.
Boswell's drawings, installations and video works have been exhibited internationally in venues like Gagosian, London, UK (2023) | Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, DE (2023) | Propsect 5, New Orleans, US (2021) | Drawing Biennial, London, UK (2021) | Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2019) | Somerset House, London, UK (2019) | British Film Institute, London, UK | Sundance, London | Constitution Hill, Johannesburg | Pinchuk Centre, Kiew | The Fine Art Society, London | Biennale of the Moving Image, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva, CH (2016) | Xi’An Academy of Fine Arts, China | Gothenburg Biennale | Royal Festival Hall, London.
Works of hers are in the collection of the BFI National Archive, London, UK | Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), US | RISD Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, US | The British Museum, London, UK | The Studio Museum, New York, US | UK Government Art Collection, London, UK.
