In Focus: Phoebe Boswell | Text

Installation Views / Text

Ben Hunter is pleased to present an In Focus exhibition of work by Phoebe Boswell. The presentation opens on the occasion of Boswell’s 2026 Art on the Underground commission, we move through scales of blue, which will be unveiled at Notting Hill Gate and Bethnal Green stations on 25 March.

Boswell’s recent work has considered the dichotomy of bodies of water as both repositories of painful historical experience and sites of renewal and hope. Her In Focus exhibition presents three expansive portraits of residents of a coastline that echoes East Africa. The figures are at once engaged with and ambivalent to the crystalline ocean behind them, its powerful presence is at once eternal, unpredictable, sheltering and threatening.

The Saltwater Within Us, also installed as part of the presentation, belongs to a series of oil paintings of intimate, interlocking figures suspended underwater. Upon learning that 95% of Black British adults do not swim, Boswell rented an underwater film studio and invited members of the public to swim with loved ones who do not usually feel safe in water. Through a Black diasporic lens, this body of work critically engages water as a site of liberation, as well as a locus of trauma, thus revealing within it the radical promise of hope.

For her Art on the Underground commission, Boswell invites audiences to consider how we relate to the natural world, even in an urban setting like London. She expands on her thoughts around water, exploring it as a container for resistance, joy, intimacy, release, remembrance, and possibility. we move through scales of blue comprises four photographic tableaus which are installed on panels running adjacent to the escalators at both stations and animated by the viewer travelling up or down the stairs.

London Underground shares its subterranean space beneath the city with a labyrinth of lost rivers and waterways. Boswell’s commission traces the notion of the waterway, evoking aquatic journeys and migratory routes to, from, and within London. Following a public call out to swimming communities around Bethnal Green and Notting Hill, this new artwork builds on her ongoing practice of reclaiming water for Black diasporic communities, and features swimmers who have made London their home, or whose families have historically migrated here.

Further information on the Art on the Underground commission, here.