Remedios: Drawing on the Walls

It’s always a special install for me when I get to draw directly onto the walls of a gallery. I’m always so grateful for the process. Something about insisting myself on the space, something about the time and triumph of labour, something about the scars the charcoal finds (and works with) on the skin of the building, a result of a history of prior stories, prior hands, prior artworks and art-making…but at the same time something about the impermanence of mark-making, the inability to commodify the act in an (art)world that prides consumption, the fact that you really have to be there too to see it. Something definitely about risk. And fear. And always about learning, all ways.

Anyway, being invited back to Gothenburg by @stina_edblom to do my first international solo in a public institution and finding myself drawing on the @goteborgskonsthall walls took me right back to 2015, to being so new to the game, being covered in charcoal, and drawing a life size dying elephant for my installation The Matter of Memory, as part of @edyanganiose’s incredible @goteborg_biennial. It’s absolutely wild to me how much life has happened in between.

This Remedios was originally posted @phoebe.boswell

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Phoebe Boswell

Phoebe Boswell (b. 1982, Kenya), born in Nairobi to a Kikuyu mother and British Kenyan father, brought up in the Arabian Gulf, and now living and working in London, makes work anchored to a restless state of diasporic consciousness. Combining draftswomanship and digital technology, she creates immersive installations and bodies of work which layer drawing, animation, sound, video, and interactivity in an effort to find new languages robust yet open and multifaceted enough to house, centre, and amplify voices and histories which, like her own, are often systemically marginalised or sidelined as 'other'. Boswell studied at the Slade School of Art and Central St Martins. She is currently the Bridget Riley Drawing Fellow at the British School at Rome, a Ford Foundation Fellow, and is represented in the United States by Sapar Contemporary, New York. Her work has been widely exhibited: with galleries including Kristin Hjellegjerde, Carroll / Fletcher, and Tiwani Contemporary; art fairs Art15, 1:54, and Expo Chicago; and has screened at Sundance, the London Film Festival, LA Film Festival, Blackstar, Underwire, British Animation Awards, and CinemAfrica amongst others. She participated in the Gothenburg International Biennial of Contemporary Art 2015, the Biennial of Moving Images 2016 at the Centre d'Art Contemporain in Geneva, and received the Future Generation Art Prize's Special Prize in 2017, consequently exhibiting as part of the Collateral Events programme at the 57th Venice Biennale.