africanah.org

Arena for Contemporary African, African-American and Caribbean Art

Phoebe Boswell

PhoebeBoswellPortrait

 

 

 

Phoebe Boswell: “I have always had a delicate understanding of the meaning of ‘home’.”

 

 

About:

PhoebeBoswellDamani2014

Damani, 2014.

Phoebe Boswell (b. 1982) combines traditional draughtsmanship and digital technology to create charged drawings, animations and installations that combine to form a language through which to communicate global, fragmented narratives such as her own, narratives which cannot be easily explained – contained – in a single image, or a single screen film. Born in Kenya to a Kikuyu mother and fourth generation British Kenyan father, and brought up as an expatriate in the Middle East before coming to London where she now lives and works, her history – her identity – is rooted in transient middle points and passages of migration, and as such, her trajectory is always anchored to a personal exploration of ‘home’.

PhoebeBoswellMarama

Marama, 2014.
PhoebeBowellSiquinn
Siquinn, 2014.

 

PhoebeBoswelltransitterminal

 

Transit Terminal, installation, 2014.

A graduate of the Slade School of Art and Central St Martins, her work has been exhibited widely in the UK, in galleries such as Kristin Hjellegjerde, Royal Academy, Bonhams Bond Street and the Mall Galleries, whilst her animation work has been nominated for various awards including Best Student Film in the Bradford Animation Festival, Best Animation in Rushes Soho Shorts and Best Film twice in the British Animation Awards Public Choice. She was nominated and shortlisted for the Art Foundation’s Animation Fellowship, and was the first recipient of the Sky Academy Arts Scholarship, both in 2012. Boswell exhibited her Sky Academy funded moving image installation The Matter of Memory at Carroll / Fletcher Gallery in London in 2014 alongside John Akomfrah and Rashaad Newsome, is involved in Paul Goodwin’s African Diaspora Artists of the 21st Century project, and is currently a Florence Trust 2015 Artist-in-Residence where she is exploring belief systems for a new body of work, whilst collaborating with Binyavanga Wainaina on a digital literary project called Since Everything Suddens in the Hurricane. (website information)

See also article on her work of Yvette Greslé on Africanah.org