Phoebe Boswell at Ben Hunter

Ben Hunter

3 October – 29 November 2024

Phoebe Boswell’s interdisciplinary practice combines drawing, performance, writing, sound, animation and more recently painting. Born in Kenya to a Kikuyu-Kenyan born mother and a British-Kenyan father and raised in the Arabian Gulf, the London-based artist explores notions of freedom, care, contested histories and imagined futures through a Black feminist and multifaceted diasporic lens.

The artist’s latest solo exhibition 'Like Hydrogen Like Oxygen’, currently on view at Ben Hunter, showcases a new series of large-scale oil paintings and a pastel drawing that explore the Black body’s relationship to water as both a site of trauma and loss when associated with the Middle Passage. But the artist also examines water as a metaphor for renewal, resistance and hope – a recurring topic in Boswell’s work as seen in Sentinel (Green) (2021) that CAS acquired for The Stanley and Audry Burton Gallery in Leeds recently. Belonging to the series Future Ancestors: Sentinels (2021), Boswell portrays the fishermen near her ancestral home in Zanzibar, Tanzania, whose lives have been intertwined with the sea for generations and who  face a multitude of challenges brought on by climate change, tourism, and overfishing. By bestowing upon these fishermen, the title of 'Future Ancestors', Boswell honours these men who yearn for a "new place" that transcends Zanzibar's historical identity as a slave port and the pressing climate crisis.

The paintings at Ben Hunter are based on film stills that derive from her immersive film installation Dwellings which Boswell created in an underwater studio for the Biennale in Lyon in 2022. When she found out that 95% of Black British adults do not know how to swim, she invited a group of people from the Diaspora to bring their friends, families, lovers, siblings and children to an underwater studio where she filmed them in pairs whilst they supported each other to overcome their fear of water by teaching each other how to swim.

Boswell’s intimate and tender oil paintings of intertwined figures floating in seemingly different bodies of water – ranging from the clear water of a swimming pool to the turquoise waters of shallow seawater, to the green-black colour of deeper waters – are placed against dark green painted walls. When entering the dim gallery space that radiates an eerie atmosphere, we are seductively pulled towards the colourful explosions on Boswell’s canvases, theatrically highlighted by spotlights. Zinging colour combinations of black and orange that contrast with delicate washes of brown and white paint bleeding into each other create a cinematic effect of movement and fluidity, such as in the painting So We Cling To One Another (The Seditious Embrace), 2024 that depicts a diving child holding their mother above the water. 

The pastel drawing There Are Other Worlds, 2024 depicts two interlocked bodies suspended underwater. They radiate an altar-like spiritual presence by referencing compositions of religious iconography such as the Pietà or the Crucifixion. The paintings in ‘Like Hydrogen Like Oxygen’ are contrasted with poetic writings from the Trinidadian-Canadian poet and activist Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk: Ars Poetica in 59 Versos, 2018. For example the quote printed on the gallery wall lends the show its title: ‘They all said with wonder and admiration, you are still alive like hydrogen, like oxygen.’

Boswell’s skilful play with light and shadow when capturing different skin tones draws comparisons to Old Masters such as Rembrandt or Rubens. At the same time, the flowing design of her oil paintings and her ability to paint weightless bodies and the movement of water with expressive and playful brushstrokes onto the canvas reflects Boswell’s experience of spending extensive time at the sea during stays at her family’s home in Zanzibar.

Overall, Boswell creates a meditative space in which visitors are encouraged to reflect on the Black body as an active agent rather than a silenced object. By overwriting deeply-rooted cultural associations with water as a site of horror, trauma and loss and repositioning it as a repository imbued with notions of empowerment, rebirth, care, healing and resilience, Boswell imaginatively offers the promise of a liberating new future.

Three small intimate paintings depicting Boswell and her sister titled I am, Because, You Are (2024) can additionally be seen in the exhibition ‘All that I got is you’ at Hope 93 until 7 November.

Christine Takengny, The Roden Senior Curator, Museum Acquisitions

Phoebe Boswell, Like Hydrogen Like Oxygen, Ben Hunter

44 Duke Street St James's, London SW1Y 6DD
3 October - 29 November 2024, Gallery opening times: Monday – Friday 11:00am until 5pm