TWICKENHAM.- In this immersive new work, the artist Phoebe Boswell inhabits
Orleans House Gallery and its surrounding woodlands, engaging the audience in an intergenerational call and response, where trees become repositories of enquiry. Boswell creates a sanctuary for us to raise our questions and listen to the voices of our elders as they endeavour to articulate life.
What are the questions you have always wanted to ask? What advice do you need right now? What do you still need to know?
Taking inspiration from Hermann Hesse’s ‘Trees are Sanctuaries’, the artist gathered questions through an open call which became the basis of her interviews with a vast and global group of nominated elders: from a freedom-loving feminist activist from Gorée; to an Irish ex-nun turned actor; to a Greek scientist with a passion for plants; to a psychologist from Zimbabwe who engaged grandmothers in an ecosystem of care for his community; to the first Black woman to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale.
These recorded exchanges form the basis of A Tree Says (In These Boughs The World Rustles), and unfurl into an expansive and participatory installation. Owing to Boswell's interdisciplinary approach to making, the exhibition includes polyphonic soundscapes, interactive sculpture, site-responsive wall drawings, intimate pencil studies, looped videos, and a new sonic collaboration with the internationally renowned free-improvising piano virtuoso Pat Thomas (Black Top, Moor Mother). What results is a generative layering of form and language, encouraging the audience to spend time both inside the gallery and outside, in nature.
Boswell invites audiences to explore and honour our personal and collective strengths, vulnerabilities, triumphs, sorrows, contradictions - our rage and our love; our knowns and unknowns – through storytelling and the radical act of listening. The work is about memory, history, place, and the importance of intergenerational exchange. With delicate yet rigorous energy, Boswell transforms the site into a sanctuary. Through the generous recollections and contemplations of the elders, visitors are invited to connect to lineages of knowledge and be guided by the inherent wisdom of the natural world.
Nephertiti Oboshie Schandorf on her involvement: "Being a part of this project is a blessing. Phoebe's sensitivity and dedication to holding space for these complex stories and sometimes simple questions has been deeply affecting. It is a pleasure to again work with Richmond Art Service and Orleans House Gallery to recontextualise the building and grounds with the most tender of rhizomatic cultural, emotional roots and connections. We have been nurtured not only by the richness of the soils gathered underneath our fingernails but also the breaths of our future ancestors".
Phoebe Boswell: “Making this work has been endlessly rewarding. Taking the time to sit with each participant, listening as they wind their way through the sometimes fluid sometimes knotty paths of their lives has been an immense honour. A revelation. I have learned a lot. Mostly about courage, and dignity, humour, love, and simply how to live in our own bodies as well as in relation to one another. Whenever I make work that invites participation, I am stunned by the generosity and trust inherent in the bond. It is this that informs the work - it becomes what it needs to be - and I am very grateful.”
Phoebe Boswell's figurative and interdisciplinary practice denotes a commitment of care for how we see ourselves and each other. Her work explores notions of freedom, using auto/biographical stories as catalysts to contest histories and imagine futures. Working intuitively across media, she creates immersive installations which affect and are affected by the environments they occupy, by time, gestalt, the serendipity of loops, and the presence of the audience. Boswell's paintings, drawings, installations and film & video works have been exhibited and held in collections widely, including The British Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), RISD, the British Film Institute’s National Archive and the UK Government Art Collection. She was the Bridget Riley Drawing Fellow at the British School of Rome in 2019, received the Lumière Award from the Royal Photographic Society in 2021, was Whitechapel Gallery’s 2022 writer in residence, and was commissioned to make new work for the Lyon Biennale in 2022. She recently exhibited in Rites of Passage at Gagosian and will have a solo exhibition at Wentrup Gallery in Berlin in the autumn. Boswell was born in Nairobi, Kenya, and lives and works in London.
Nephertiti Oboshie Schandorf is a producer of site responsive performance, audio and moving image in non-gallery contexts. Her practice is one that actively seeks collaboration and is informed by the formation of protective networks and cultural archives for those underrepresented or on the periphery of the contemporary UK arts ecology. Her work within the cultural sector includes the development and delivery of high profile public realm works including commissions for Art on the Underground, Somerset House and the 2021 Smithfield public realm commission with the City of London, Hawkins\Brown and Contemporary Art Society. She is a member of the Art on the Underground Advisory Panel, trustee for Artichoke and Artistic Director of Peckham Platform.
