Still Life: A Taxonomy of Being: A capsule of drawings by Phoebe Boswell (Kenya/UK) made during the UK's third national lockdown

Sapar Contemporary is delighted to present Still Life: A Taxonomy of Being, the gallery’s second solo exhibition of work by Phoebe Boswell. The exhibition features drawings and watercolors created between December 2020 and April 2021, while Boswell was sequestered at home during the UK’s third government-mandated Covid -19 lockdown. The works on paper are installed so as to create an immersive experience that also features video with a soundtrack of breathing. The works encapsulate a year in which breathing became perilous and, for many, technologies and devices functioned as the primary mediators of seeing, being, and socializing. The exhibition extends an invitation, from the artist to us all, to reflect on our shared experiences of isolation and what we will carry forward.  

Phoebe Boswell (Kenya). Underpinned by a transient and diasporic consciousness, Phoebe Boswell’s practice speaks from the porous space between here and there. She works intuitively across media, centering drawing but spanning animation, sound, video, writing, interactivity, performance and chorality. This tends to culminate in layered installations, which affect and are affected by the environments they occupy, by time, the serendipity of loops, and the presence of the audience. Aesthetics of figuration and representation through the radical imaginary of Black feminisms become tools for contemplating the body as world, worldmaking, rather than merely as object to be gazed at. Artmaking becomes a political act of service to community, where labour-intensive drawing practices, immersive technologies, and calls for collective participation denote a commitment of care for how we see ourselves and each other; how we grieve, how we love, how we rest, how we heal, how we protest, how we remember the past in order to imagine the future.

- Essay by Emma Chubb, Ph.D. Curator of Contemporary Art, Smith College Museum of Art