Phoebe Boswell | Press: Like Hydrogen Like Oxygen

Ben Hunter is thrilled to announce an exhibition of new work by Phoebe Boswell. Drawing its title, Like Hydrogen Like Oxygen, from Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk: Ars Poetica in 59 Versos, where Brand expresses that our ancestors, who were never meant to survive, “are still alive, like hydrogen, like oxygen,” Boswell presents a series of new paintings of intimate, interlocking figures suspended underwater. Through a Black diasporic lens, this body of work critically engages water as a site of trust, recovery, liberation and rebirth, as well as a locus of trauma and violence, thus revealing within it the radical promise of something else.

Upon learning that 95% of Black British adults do not swim, Boswell rented an underwater studio and invited people to bring their loved ones and help each other feel safe in the water. What ensued was a spontaneous choreography of fear, apprehension, courage, nurture and support, as each couple - from parents with their children, to siblings, to lovers - worked together to reclaim the water. In response, Boswell, in her own act of reclamation, chose to return to oil paint after years of stepping away from it. She remarks that: “Painting in oils is a liberatory practice. Paint demands you to surrender to its whim and allow it to do as it wishes, which creates a freedom of mark-making that moves you somehow towards abstraction.”

Water need not be representationally defined. Light, shadow, and the playful ripples formed by movement become patterns of brushstrokes on the canvas, and the artist frees herself from the constraints of figuration. The works do, of course, sit unequivocally within the rich lineage of British figurative painting; the tender compositions of Michael Andrews, the intimacy of Claudette Johnson's portraits, the fleshy forms of Jenny Saville’s subjects, Paula Rego’s raw, representational pastels, and the rigorous, poetic inquiry of Lubaina Himid. Boswell’s figures float weightlessly on the canvas. The sense of both weightlessness and grasping that Boswell ignites is at once palpable and effortless; these paintings navigate the tension between the sense of freedom, safety, fear and chaos that water can summon.

The exhibition reflects on the long history of cultural associations with bodies of water. It considers how water can be a repository for painful historical and contemporary experience - from the horrors of the The Middle Passage to the fated journeys of small boats off European coastlines - as well as a remedial site for radical love, for tender healing, for imagination, and for hope.

Born in Kenya, of British and Kenyan heritage, brought up in the Arabian Gulf and currently living and working in London, Boswell’s practice - which moves across media from drawing and painting, to film, video, sound, and writing - uses auto/biographical stories as catalysts to contest histories, traverse geographies and ecologies, and imagine futurity. 

Her work is held in public collections globally, including The British Museum, London; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), USA; RISD Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, USA; The British Film Institute’s National Archive, Berkhamsted, UK; the Government Art Collection, London; and The Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery, University of Leeds (acquired by Contemporary Art Society). 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, and was Whitechapel Gallery’s 2022 writer-in-residence. In 2022, she participated in the Lyon Biennial with a major installation entitled Dwelling.

Her work was included in Soulscapes at Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, 2024 and Rites of Passage at Gagosian, London, 2023. Recent solo exhibitions include A Tree Says (In These Boughs The World Rustles), Orleans House Gallery, Twickenham, UK and Liminal Beach, Wentrup Gallery, Berlin. Boswell’s writing was recently published in Five Manifestos for the Beautiful World (Knopf Canada, 2024).