Mussai explains: “In the realm of contemporary visual arts, Phoebe Boswell is a galaxy – full of light, depth and breath; possibility, vision and courage. Her art – which centres drawing but encompasses writing, moving image, installation, animation, sound, and so much more – is marked by remarkable skill, talent and a unique visual vernacular, and a deep sense of commitment. Forged from a profoundly personal, deeply feminist, decolonial, remedial ‘otherwise’, Phoebe offers us an urgent and exquisite space for collective imagining, healing, resting. Hers is a lived praxis of care, an immersive way of working that contemplates the body as a world, both vulnerable and empowered, cathartic and affirmative.”

Mussai sees Boswell’s figurative, multimedia works, as “collaborative, critical, poetic – potent visual manifestations of diasporic consciousness and embodied strategies of resistance, and insistence, that urge us to not only look, but to really see, and feel the love and commitment of a wonderful artist-alchemist who cares deeply about our collective well-being and futurity. Her work is transformative, an infinitely generous gift.”

Boswell echoes the importance of the human connection in her work, a key motivation and constant inspiration for her immersive, intuitive works. “I find myself buoyed by both the vulnerability and the necessity of our interconnectedness – who we are to one another, how we tend to and care for one another, and how we see – or fail to see – each other. I would say I’m inspired by people, by our relation to each other. How we live in this world and how we imagine beyond it. How we gather. How we love, protest, grieve, remember, heal, rage. How we reclaim ourselves. How we refuse, breathe, open up, get free.”

Boswell relays a pivotal moment in her life and practice, at the time of her solo exhibition at Autograph in 2018, where Mussai was then curator. Having experienced a life-altering injury where she lost the sight in my right eye, she says, “I wasn’t sure I’d be able to make work again.” Boswell recalls that “Artmaking became something different for me then, it took on more meaning. In the lead-up to the show she spent 21 days in the gallery, drawing herself onto the wall in soft willow charcoal. “It was an act of catharsis, to draw myself, in multiple states, and leave myself there, laid bare on that wall. That 27-metre- long drawing brought me back to life in a way.”

As she prepares to install her work “Transit Terminal” (2014) in Venice as part of UNIT London’s group exhibition, In Praise of Black Errantry, Boswell is enjoying the comforting solace and privacy of the studio, working on a new series of paintings in which she is “thinking heavily about mark making, and surrendering to the physical whim of the medium. We’re living a moment that is requiring a level of surrender to all we think we know – and we’re all trying to figure out what this entails. Within the vastness of it, I’m finding that the simple act of being attendant to mark making – to how a pigment marks a surface, begins to feel so liberating, revelatory – it can open up worlds.”

Boswell has also been writing. “I’ve always written, but not always publicly. The Whitechapel writers residency pushed me to centre my writing more as an explicit part of my practice. Writing is like a confidante, or like connective tissue. It provides another space to think and dream in.” And that is exactly what Boswell’s works provide the viewer; a chance to slow down, to feel, and to imagine.