Phoebe Boswell (b. 1982, Kenya) lives and works in London. Born in Nairobi to a Kikuyu mother and fourth generation British Kenyan father, and brought up as an expatriate in the Middle East, she combines traditional draftswomanship and digital technology to create drawings, animations and installations. Boswell studied Painting at the Slade School of Art and 2D Animation at Central St Martins, London. She was nominated/shortlisted for the Art Foundation's Animation Fellowship 2012, and was the first recipient of the Sky Academy Arts Scholarship, which she used to produce her immersive installation The Matter of Memory; it first showed alongside work by John Akomfrah and Rashaad Newsome at Carroll / Fletcher Gallery, London in 2014. She participated in the Gothenburg International Biennial of Contemporary Art 2015 and the Biennial of Moving Images 2016 at the Centre d'Art Contemporain in Geneva, and has exhibited at Art15, 1:54 London and New York, and galleries including Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, The Fine Art Society, New Art Exchange, and Tiwani Contemporary, where she recently had her first solo exhibition in London. Dear Mr Shakespeare, her Guardian / British Council commissioned short film collaboration with filmmaker Shola Amoo (in which she wrote, performed, and animated) was nominated for Best International Short at Sundance 2017, she has been listed as an emerging UK filmmaker of note in Film London's Selected7, nominated by this year's Jarman Prize shortlist, and was shortlisted for - and awarded the Special Prize by - the Future Generation Art Prize 2017, through which she is exhibiting her interactive installation Mutumia at the 57th Venice Biennale. Boswell is currently an artist-in-residence at Somerset House Studios in London.
*
Central to Phoebe Boswellâs work is the state of diasporic consciousness. The remnants of imperialism, and later technological advancement, mean the world is now the most connected it has ever been, and its people the most fluid, displaced and dispersed. Conditions of diaspora is an ongoing, yet under-examined state of being. Although Boswell was born in Nairobi, she was brought up in the Arabian Gulf. Growing up as an expatriate, she reveals that she felt, âamputated from Kenya, in a way,â admitting, âI do not exist there, it is not my place.â
The fragility of her Kenyan identity, and this rootless aspect of her being, ignites her work with a delicate search for belonging, through which her art becomes a vehicle that drives her on her journey home. And even though she admits Kenya will never be home, her art enables her to channel this yearning, so that through it, she can get closer to her heritage, metaphorically. The words of James Baldwin are particularly crucial to Boswell's sense of belonging; "the place in which I'll fit will not exist until I make it."
