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.”
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.
Ben Hunter Gallery, London. Closes 29th November, free entry. www.benhunter.gallery/phoebe-boswell-like-hydrogen-like-oxygen
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