What happens when the things that hold our deepest wounds also hold the possibility of freedom?
In this episode of Extraordinary Creatives, I’m joined by Phoebe Boswell, a Kenyan-British artist and writer whose work explores memory, identity, embodiment and the complex relationships between people, places and histories.
Phoebe’s practice moves across drawing, painting, animation, installation and writing, creating deeply personal works that examine the body as a site of memory, vulnerability and possibility. Her work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale and shown in major institutions and collections around the world, establishing her as one of the most compelling voices working across contemporary art today.
At the heart of Phoebe’s practice is a fascination with what bodies carry — the histories, experiences and emotions that remain present even when they are not visible. Her work often begins with questions around representation, particularly the representation of Black bodies and the ways they have been seen, controlled, celebrated and misunderstood.
In this conversation, we explore Phoebe’s recent large-scale commission for Art on the Underground, now running alongside the escalators at Notting Hill Gate and Bethnal Green stations in London. Inspired by her research into bodies of water, the work moves through different shades of blue, creating a space for reflection within the everyday movement of commuters.
The project began with a statistic from the Black Swimming Association: that ninety-six per cent of Black British adults do not swim regularly. From there, Phoebe explored the many meanings held by water — as a place of trauma and exclusion, but also as a place of joy, freedom and possibility.
We talk about how she works with communities without extracting from them, and the responsibility that comes with making work connected to other people’s experiences. Phoebe shares how a project she developed with fishermen in Zanzibar challenged her assumptions about collaboration and value, reminding her that the poetic meaning she imagined was not necessarily the meaning others needed.
We also discuss her relationship with painting, and the surprising return to a medium she had stepped away from for twenty years. Rather than returning to resolve old questions, Phoebe came back to painting as a way of exploring new possibilities within figuration, the body and the freedom that can exist within representation.
Throughout the conversation, Phoebe speaks about holding contradictions rather than trying to solve them. Her work allows grief and joy, rupture and beauty, vulnerability and power to exist alongside one another.
Ultimately, this is a conversation about making work that remains open — open to complexity, open to other people and open to the possibility that the most meaningful questions are often the ones that do not have simple answers.
What We Learned from Phoebe Boswell
What stays with me most from this conversation is Phoebe’s ability to hold two things at once.
She describes figurative practice as a kind of lovemaking — an act of sustained attention and deep looking. Through painting and drawing, particularly of the Black female body, she creates a space where bodies are not objects to be observed, but complex beings carrying histories, emotions and possibility.
And yet, alongside that intimacy, there is a refusal to allow her work to be reduced only to questions of identity. She speaks about returning to painting after twenty years away, not because she had found all the answers, but because she wanted to discover what the language of the medium could still become.
That same openness appears throughout the conversation.
Water becomes both a site of trauma and a place of freedom. A swimming pool can hold fear and exclusion, but also movement, play and beauty. A self-portrait can be both an act of presence and an expression of grief.
Perhaps the most revealing moment comes through her story of working with fishermen in Zanzibar. She imagined a poetic gesture of connection through a shared boat, but the fishermen had a different understanding of what they needed. They wanted financial support. They used it to open a shop, buy a motorbike and support their families.
The poetry, Phoebe realised, was not where she had expected it to be.
That feels like one of the deepest lessons from this conversation. The responsibility of making work with others is not to impose our own meaning onto an experience, however well intentioned. It is to remain open enough to be changed by what we encounter.
The line that stays with me most is Phoebe’s statement:
“I don’t want to be free off the back of anyone else.”
There is something profoundly generous in that idea. Freedom, in her understanding, is not something achieved alone. It exists in relationship with other people, and the tension between personal expression and collective responsibility is not something to escape — it is part of the work.
So if you are returning to something you left behind, questioning the boundaries of your practice, or trying to make work that is ambitious without losing connection to others, this conversation offers a powerful invitation.
Trust the porous borders between your ideas.
Return to what has changed.
And keep making work that honours the people and experiences within it before it asks anything from the world outside.
Thank you for listening.
