About the exhibition

Visceral and candid, Boswell’s layered imagery moves from an East London operating theatre, where she undergoes surgery to save her right eye, to an angiogram of her broken heart, to an imagined monocular army that she summons for strength, to the blurred depiction of her blinded sight.

We find her submerged in the contested space between land and sea at her family home on the shores of Zanzibar, where she retreated to recuperate. The artist’s own figure features prominently. In the lead-up to the exhibition, Boswell will draw a twenty-meter long extended portrait of the self onto the gallery walls in soft willow charcoal.

This is an act of both defiance – ‘I am here, I am present, I exist, I won’t be silent’ - and acceptance – ‘I'm fragile, I'm vulnerable, our bodies are fallible and unexpected’. Transcending beyond a meditation on the self, the fractured nature of being and diasporic consciousness as a strategy of resistance emerge as recurrent themes. Boswell explores how one might articulate a shared language to express grief: creating a set of intimate visual vocabularies which are vulnerable and empowering, personal and collective, cathartic and affirmative.

Boswell was the first recipient of the Sky Academy Arts Scholarship, was awarded the Special Prize at the Future Generation Art Prize for her interactive installation Mutumia, which consequently showed as part of the 57th Venice Biennale, and has recently been awarded the Bridget Riley Drawing Fellowship at the British School of Rome. An international solo show of her work will open in February 2019 at the Goteborg Konsthalle, Sweden.

She Summons An Army, 2018: Conceived at East London’s Moorfields Eye Hospital while Boswell contemplated the sudden loss of vision in her right eye, She Summons An Army introduces a monocular legion of drawn female figures whose heads are rendered as single eyeballs. In these 34 drawings, Boswell returns to important themes in her work: a continuous search for home, the nude female form as a vessel for embodied knowledge, and her ongoing salute to women who use their bodies in protest.

Drawing on memory, and how it splinters and dissipates in times of grief, miniscule reproductions of Boswell’s family photographs are dotted throughout the corridors of the building.

Upstairs in gallery 2, immerse yourself in a constellation of video works: A Broken Heart, Rupture, Rapture, and New Moon. Projected in an installation alongside wall-sized reproductions of Boswell’s drawings of the turbulent sea, these works rely on medical imaging techniques - capturing Boswell’s body in a space of cardiac and ocular trauma.

Also see a large new original drawing, Between Love and Loss Where We Might Glean Things.