Our Miraculous Hearts
Phoebe Boswell, Love’s Promise to the Weather, 2024, and Phoebe Boswell photographed by Adenike Oke.
‘I’m reflecting on the first question you asked—how’s your heart?—and it’s strange to think about it because it’s tested me so much, and in many ways it’s fragile. I know now because of what’s happened to it, it’s going to be fragile forever. But at the same time, it’s absolutely not. Your heart can do miraculous things’.
PHOEBE BOSWELL
If courage had a colour, it would be Boswell Blue. A tender meditation on grief, healing and courage, with an artist who creates portals that return us to our miraculous hearts.
Our Miraculous Hearts with Phoebe Boswell is available wherever you listen to podcasts.
Busy Being Black listeners are invited to Queeriosities (26–28 September) in Peckham, London. Use the code busybeingblack10 for a discount on opening night tickets.
Josh Rivers:
Phoebe Boswell, I cannot tell you how delighted, honoured, thrilled, enthused I am to have you here. Thank you so much for accepting this invitation to Busy Being Black.
Phoebe Boswell:
Thank you for having me. I feel like it's a long time coming. I think we spoke first about doing this a few years ago, no?
JOSH:
Yes, you had reached out to me to lend my voice to and participate in the wonderful work that you were doing in New Orleans, Do We Muse on the Sky or Remember the Sea, which I was so honoured to be a part of. Thank you. But you know what? I'm learning everything in its time. Everything happens when it's supposed to.
PHOEBE:
Exactly.
JOSH:
As you know, to open all of my conversations on the show, I ask all of my guests the same question. How's your heart?
PHOEBE:
It's good. It is robust and healing. And, yeah, it's treated me well, I think.
JOSH:
I ask you this question—and it's not by rote, right? It's a very intentional way to open these conversations—but I understand that question might also land quite differently for you as well. And we'll get to that, I think. So I first encountered you and your work at Autograph in 2019, with The Space Between Things, and I was stunned. I was blown away by your vulnerability and the sheer diversity of mediums you employed to express the journey you were on at the time, and that you may actually still be on. So I first want to thank you for your artistic and emotional generosity. The Space Between Things seems to me like it took a tremendous amount of courage. Did you feel courageous at the time?
PHOEBE:
I don't think I felt courageous. I felt like art was something that changed meaning for me. It became a safety mechanism, or it became like a life jacket in a way. And I don't think I was thinking about it as courageous. I think I was just seeing it as a way through. I kind of thought it was self-indulgent to begin with, to be honest. I thought that it was helping me, but it wasn't necessarily for anyone else or to be seen by anyone else. I'd had a very bad accident. And it had caused a whole number of problems, including losing sight in my right eye, and the stress of it all made my heart rupture. So, I went into a very bleak place, as you might imagine. Going to the studio became a way through, and it became something that was kind of aside from anything I'd thought about art previously, about what it does externally, and it became a completely internal conversation. I think it definitely gave me courage, but I don't think that's how I was processing it at the time.
JOSH:
You know, it's just now occurring to me, I'm in my memory walking through the exhibition for the first time, and I believe that within The Space Between Things, there is footage from the surgeries that your doctor performed on your eye and that he contributed, if you will, to this exploration. And I believe those were in the upstairs gallery, right? It was quite dark, and downstairs, around the walls, these beautiful illustrations of you in all these different forms and shapes. And there was nothing, to my mind at the time, bleak about it. It was curious. It was inquisitive. And maybe that says a lot about me as the viewer, right? And so to be returning to The Space Between Things now, all these years later, and to re-engage with this work again, I feel it more. I do feel a kind of, maybe even a grasping, right? If I can put all of this stuff in front of me, I might be able to make more sense of it. Has your relationship to The Space Between Things evolved since that time?
PHOEBE:
First, I'd be really interested to know from you why you think it reaches you differently now. But for me, it was a very meaningful and cathartic work at the time, and a lot of decisions were made in that work to leave it there. It was a 27-metre-long drawing. I would take a photo of myself every morning in whatever state I was in, naked, and I would draw that onto the wall. And it was in willow charcoal because it's so soft and it's so delicate and it can be damaged or blown away very easily or rubbed away very easily. I wanted there to be this sense that I'm putting this here and I'm making a bid to trust you to protect it and protect me and to hold me in it, which was something that I was struggling with after this thing that happened physically to me. And then the other decision to make it on the wall so that it would have to be removed—it wouldn't last. I didn't want this to be something that then became something I put in storage, or I had to think about how to sell. It wasn't that work, and so I kind of left it there, and I really mean that—like the intention was to leave it in the space and to leave this story in the space.
I was really grateful to Autograph and to Renée Mussai, who was the curator, for giving me that space and for giving me the time. They gave me 21 days to do this thing, even though we didn't know what it was going to be at the end. And then it kind of took on a life of its own as a lot of art does. I think it reached people. I think it gave people who came into that space some kind of maybe freedom to also feel their feelings and to kind of work through something to do with grief or something to do with trauma. And so it gave me a lot, that show. It gave me a lot of hope, and it gave me a lot of re-trusting in the things that I'd stopped trusting. And I have really fond memories of hearing people's responses to it. It really did save me from a really difficult time. So I'll always be really indebted to it.
On the Line, Phoebe Boswell, 2019. Willow charcoal on wall, Autograph ABP, Shoreditch. Intentionally impermanent. Photograph by Josh Rivers (24 January 2019).
JOSH:
The Space Between Things lands differently with me, or I orient myself differently to it because in 2019, I had my full armour on. It was impenetrable at that stage, and I was only two years out of—less than two years out of—the tremendously painful takedown and public shaming. I wasn't accessing myself fully at that time, and I was really, really focused on being beyond reproach, beyond critique. And so I think there was a lot that I engaged with at that time that I engaged with quite surface level, particularly if it had anything to do with grief or pain or—I was like, this is a thing to be observed only. Now I'm coming to The Space Between Things and indeed art in general, raw, open, ready. I want to be touched, transformed, moved around, startled. Five years later, I come to your work much more honestly.
PHOEBE:
I love that. I'm glad for that. I think for me, art is a place where I can be very vulnerable in ways that, still now, I struggle with in reality. I think it always has been, but that moment was a real pivotal and defining moment for me to know what art is and what it does for me. I think even now it's where I feel like I can be as soft and raw and open, but I think trauma does things to you that are non-linear; and with all the best intentions and all the will in the world to want to learn from the lesson, learn from the pain, you still find yourself putting walls up and being afraid and being untrusting, but love requires you to be trusting. So, art is that place for me, and I'm always really moved when I hear that it offers that place to anyone else.
JOSH:
Is there an artist who does that for you, or who has always done that for you, whose work cracks you open?
PHOEBE:
That is impossible. There are too many, honestly. I would say an artist who always has the ability to open me up, but also to kind of embrace and caress me is Dineo Seshee Bopape. She works with the land, and she works with soil and she makes these really felt spaces that require you to be open and to be soft. I think Paula Rego's pastels always have a way to kind of rip me open.
JOSH:
Mine's El Greco. I first saw his work in 2014 or 2015 at the Prado in Madrid. I had spent a couple of hours in there, and when I came across El Greco, I was like, ‘Oh my God, who is this guy?’ And every time I go back to Madrid, I go see El Greco at the Prado. And for years, I haven't been able to explain why I'm seeing myself reflected back to me—and this year I could finally name it: it is the way El Greco's paintings reveal that morbidity and vitality live together. You cannot separate them. And it's the storminess of the backgrounds and the vibrancy of the colours. You don't have one that's only vibrant and one that's only dark; they're always together. It's a reflection of how I feel inside, right? There's such a luminescence inside, and there is also—to maybe use a Boswellian example—a very stormy seascape.
Detail of Manifesto (for a Lost Cause), Paula Rego, 1965. Collection: Tate Britain.
Detail of The Adoration of the Shepherds, El Greco, c. 1614. Collection: Museo del Prado.
For Our Soals Soared There, Phoebe Boswell, 2018. Willow charcoal on wall, Autograph ABP, Shoreditch. Intentionally impermanent.
PHOEBE:
I actually had a really surprising response recently to Rothko, who everyone says, ‘Rothko! When I stand in front of Rothko …’ and I have never felt that ever. I've never understood that. But I went to see the show in Paris, and it was a retrospective. I didn't know that he was figurative before—like his early works are all figurative. And then there was the war, and artists were trying to figure out how to do figuration after seeing so much violence, which I think is a moment that we're also in now. Guernica was made, and all of these really important artworks were created. And his figurative work before was—I mean, it was solid. It was good. And then he had this moment of rupture. And then everything figuratively—it all kind of started falling apart. He started doing these allegorical works, which kind of didn't—I don't know, they were less convincing, I guess. And then you saw the moment where it all just fell apart completely and the figure was dissolved into what became what we now know to be ‘Rothko’.
I've always thought about what abstraction means and whether there is a kind of liberation in abstraction. When you're walking in the world with subjectivities that are seldom seen fully or seen without nuance or care, I've often wondered about whether removing the figure and removing that conversation would be some kind of liberating moment. And when I then stood in front of the Rothko that we know, I felt a really strong sensation of like when the human reaches the end of their rope and they break and they falter and it all dissolves—like anything to do with meaning or language dissolves into something else and then the spirit comes out and now I kind of feel them more. But I was very surprised by that moment because I wasn't expecting it at all.
JOSH:
The big lesson for me about art—well, I think there's a very intellectual way of engaging with art. We learn a lot from John Berger's way of seeing and, you know, we apply our intellectual, educated brain to understand where the artist was and who he was, blah, blah, blah. And then there's the underworld of our emotions that art reveals to us and that sometimes we cannot explain—and that are perhaps not even meant to be explained. And maybe that's the power in abstraction as well, is that like, I don't know why that wall of colour does what it does, but it is me. That is how I feel.
The images which arise out of the depths link us to that throbbing, insistent hum which is the sound of the eternal. As children, we listened to the sound of the sea still echoing in the shell we picked up by the shore. That ancestral roar links us to the great sea which surges within us as well.
James Hollis
JOSH:
I'm going to bring you very gently back to The Space Between Things before we move on. One of the elements about The Space Between Things that really resonates with me is this non-spoken conversation about grief between you and your father that people wouldn't really know unless they had a conversation with you about how you managed to capture these beautiful visuals of you floating in this huge body of water. So I wonder if you can talk to listeners a little bit about this element of the exhibition and how you brought your father into a conversation about grief with you through this art-making practice.
Still from Ythlaf, Phoebe Boswell, 2018.
PHOEBE:
So it really struck me how ill-equipped I was and we were to deal with the magnitude of what had happened, and how culturally, growing up in the west, the language around healing is ‘grin and bear it’, ‘suck it up’, ‘you're so brave if you don't show how much this is affecting you’. And not for any fault of my parents, but I grew up with the understanding that it's really brave to act as much as possible to an outside eye as if you are not being completely heartbroken by what's happened to you. And because my heart physically broke from this moment, there was no way of doing that because everything was a testimony to the fact that I was in a lot of deep pain. But that was really uncomfortable for me and for everyone involved. And I think I was kind of ashamed to be weak in this moment. And obviously, I could see that my dad was struggling to contain his own grief seeing his daughter in this bad situation. And we couldn't talk about it.
I decided to do this work when I was in the heart hospital. The woman next to me was in a lot of pain, very delirious. And she kept saying, ‘Take me to the lighthouse, take me to the lighthouse’. So that's where this imagery around the sea came from because I was lying in bed with this broken eye and this broken heart, and I was thinking, ‘Where is my lighthouse and who can be my lighthouse and can I be my lighthouse?’ So doing this with my dad was a way for us, as you said, to be inside this grief without having to say it. I was offered therapy because of the physical trauma of what happened, and it was the first time I did therapy. I never thought I wanted to do therapy—at the beginning, I was like, ‘I don't need it, I’m totally fine’. It was a huge gift because it opened me up to understand a lot of things. In a lot of ways, it was mutually therapeutic. So I think I understand my dad better, and I think I express myself perhaps better now. I don't know. I think it's hard to talk about parents in this public way that doesn't—you know, yeah…
JOSH:
Sure. To not be specific to your experience or your relationship with your parents, what I really loved about this gesture was this invitation to ‘stand beside me in a way that you might know how.’ We're living in this culture in which everyone needs to meet you where you are, otherwise they don't love you. This process, this invitation that you extended—even choosing the technology to say, ‘He'll identify with this’—it feels to me like such a necessary reminder that the goal isn't always for someone else to communicate explicitly in the way I need them to. It's for us to meet each other at some point and decide where we go from there. And so I wanted to bring that up because I thought that gesture from you was just such a potent and poignant reminder for this moment we're inhabiting together now.
PHOEBE:
Thank you. I really appreciate that and how you've worded it because, yeah, you know, you get in the weeds, I think, when it's such a personal relationship. So thank you for saying that. Yeah, that means a lot to me, actually.
JOSH:
Over the course of my research for this conversation, I learned that the audiences within and beyond your work matter to you in an extraordinary way. And so I'm very curious—basically, this is a selfishly curious question: how do you manage the balance between your desire for creative expression as a way of understanding yourself in the world and the challenges that can arise when we present our art and indeed ourselves to the public?
PHOEBE:
The challenges being what?
JOSH:
Criticism. Misidentification... Maybe I'm shielding myself. Hold on, let me approach it this way. Busy Being Black, my writing and my poetry—my creative practice is often a way for me to reveal more of myself, not only to myself but to other people, in the hopes that I might be able to get closer to and more intimate with other people, to become more entangled and enmeshed. And that's a huge growth and shift away from even two years ago, right? This desire to be a bit more open. So the challenges for me are maybe public and private, right? There's the interior world and a voice that says, 'This is too private and you don't need to share this, and you look weak or like you can't handle life. You're a man', you know? And then also putting yourself out into the public space as an act of—as an invitation for others to also be vulnerable and intimate—sometimes it's denied, right, we're refused, or people aren't ready for it, or you're misunderstood or wounded sometimes. And so much of your work is asking people to come to you and to come participate in this external expression of your interior world. And so I wonder if any challenges emerge for you in that process of bringing Phoebe Boswell to play in community with other people via your artistic practice?
PHOEBE:
In many ways, I see myself as a conduit, and I often think about how my work can be of service to others, whether they're the people who come forward to be participants in it, or whether it's the audience that meets it. And because so much of my work is very multi-layered, I think it's really difficult for someone to have a very clear, one-minded view on the work, because it doesn't really allow you to do that. It asks that you look at it in multiple ways. There are usually multiple voices within it. It's not me telling you what to think or how to feel about something. I anticipate that people will have differing views on it—again, people meet it where they are, and I think that says more about them than the work.
I think if I worried too much about that, I'm already a huge overthinker. So I think I would struggle, and what I would struggle with is trusting that the people who are involved in the work with me will be held properly. I care more about that than being personally criticised, but I say that because the work is a way for me to—I feel like I can be braver in that than this. This kind of vulnerability I'm more nervous about. This gives me a lot more anxiety because it's me, and I welcome the invitation because I think that you do it really well—you meet people where they are. I don't know. You have to meet yourself over and over and over again when you're making anything, and you meet the bad sides of yourself and the good sides and everything in between. And so that's enough of a critique for me
JOSH:
Oh, I understand, yeah. Before our conversation started, we said, 'Let's speak from the scar, not from the wound', and this happens on Busy Being Black. Sometimes I'll ask a question, and I'll hear the response and I'll know that my question came from a wound. That reluctance to be fully myself in the public space and—you know, maybe one doesn't need to be their full selves in the public space. I rail against this idea of authenticity. I think it's so contrived. Whoever we choose to be in any space is us. It's a decision that we make. It's an armour that we put on and we fashion, we buff and we shine—it's ours. And so being able to discern in which moments and with which people it's safe to show up in different ways is a huge part of growth and indeed healing.
PHOEBE:
Safety is really key. I think we have to know the world that we live in and how it responds to us and our, as you say, authenticity. Art is a gift because it allows me to be vulnerable in a public place and for me it's more to do with how you feel safe in your own body, how you feel safe in the most intimate relationships and then how that kind of widens out; and it's a constant navigation of how much do I allow my fear to be dissuaded by this possibility of love or anything else—from first myself, then my intimate people, then the wider community and then the world. It's a constant navigation. I get it wrong often. I don't know if it's right or wrong about it, but I—yeah, it's not easy.
Poetry cannot be a replacement for therapy. I was literally misusing poetry: I would perform poetry on stage while my wounds were still open, and I got addicted to the praise. I need to have a safe distance between myself and my pain and the output of it.
BEN ELLIS
JOSH:
You're bringing to mind a conversation I had with a poet a number of years ago. One of the things that stood out to me was that if performing a piece of work still makes you cry or it still hurts, that it's too soon, that you should wait until it doesn't hurt before you share it. And at the time, I was like, 'Yes!' because it was permission for me to keep it all in: I'm just going to wait until this is baked, and then I'll share it. Your work is this intimate and global conversation about rupture and repair and enslavement and misogynoir. These are wounds that will hurt within you and within the community. So I wonder how that advice lands with you about waiting until the wound doesn't hurt.
PHOEBE:
I think it would be wonderful to assume the wound is going to stop hurting!
JOSH:
Touché!
PHOEBE:
I mean, when I feel really great, the last thing I want to be doing is making work. I want to be making love or going on holiday. I think we're very lucky as artists to have this place to be able to tend to the wound in a way that is not destructive, in a way that offers something to ourselves and then to whoever might then reach it. I think the wound is an enigmatic place to make from or to think from, and it's a messy place. I think the making can be made whenever you need to make, and usually I need to make when I'm feeling something really deeply in my belly. And the way you then speak about the work, perhaps it benefits from some time, so that you're not projecting onto it in a way that is not beneficial to you. As we were saying about the narratives that come with wounds, you sometimes become more stuck in the narrative than in the wound. And you don't realise the wound actually has scabbed over and healed, but you're still saying the same wounded narrative.
JOSH:
Lorca said that all great art has duende. He used flamenco dancers as the example par excellence: the guttural stomping and the clapping and the hoarse singing is the darkness of the interior scraping its way out. And that's how Lorca identified what was art or poetry as provocation, as opposed to propaganda.
PHOEBE:
We also have to contend with the fact that, as Black people, our trauma and our pain have been so heavily commodified, and so there's a kind of perversity in a way to always making that kind of work. I think sometimes you have to refuse to do that, and you refuse to only do work that is harrowing.
JOSH:
I think listeners can anticipate what's coming as well. Kevin Quashie told us: Blackness, as we understand it in the West, is anti-Black, right? Capital-B Blackness is always supposed to tell us something about democracy or progress or violence, and what we miss in that construction of Blackness is what he calls our 'wild and voluptuous interior worlds'. So, I think of that too, that refusal and indeed retreat—I'm actually going to retreat into my interior world, that is also an act of refusal, right?
PHOEBE:
And offering a place where we're not always thinking about that. And we're able to celebrate joy and, you know, all of these things that we have in abundance.
Phoebe Boswell, Love’s Promise to the Weather, 2024.
JOSH:
I think this leads us very beautifully to Like Hydrogen, Like Oxygen, which was presented at Ben Hunter Gallery in London. Phoebe, I gasped when I walked in. It literally took my breath away, and my best friend, Lerone, was there too, and he was like, 'Oh my God.' And I said, 'I told you: Phoebe Boswell.' We'll get into what specifically took my breath away. First, invite us into the genesis of Like Hydrogen, Like Oxygen.
PHOEBE:
So I've been thinking a lot about bodies of water since The Space Between Things, as these spaces that are remedial, they're healing, they're womb-like, but also they hold historical and contemporary migratory trauma for us, but also they are the places between here and there. So they could be the places of non-citizenship. And if we think of citizenship as always being aligned with unfreedom, because not all citizens are treated the same and citizenship in itself requires a kind of power structure that doesn't hold us all the same. So these spaces of the in-between can become kind of spaces where we can contemplate liberation. So I was doing a lot of research and a lot of work about bodies of water. I was the Whitechapel writer in residence in 2022, and they give it to artists to use writing in their work, not to writers. And it kind of pushes you to think about writing more clearly and more focused. So I wrote Bodies of Water, which was a performance piece. And I also made a piece called Dwelling for the Lyon Biennial, which was curated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, and it was called Manifesto of Fragility.
In the process, I found out that 95 per cent of Black British adults don't swim. And I did lots of research in the residency about asking people about their relationships to water and to swimming, and it struck me that we need to reclaim the water. So I rented an underwater recording studio, an underwater tank. And I invited people to bring their loved ones and help each other feel safe in the water. Over two days, we gave each couple—I think between an hour and an hour and a half—to just do whatever they wanted to in the water. And we kind of left them to it. It wasn't guided at all. And we filmed it. And it became this choreography, this amazing choreography, which had in it like fear and courage and intimacy and holding and trust—it was like a ballet of all of these things that, like all the work that I do where I invite people in, these couples really brought to it such generosity and such courage. And I was really stunned by how everyone brought themselves to the work.
Phoebe Boswell, There Are Other Worlds, 2024. Installation view at Ben Hunter Gallery.
PHOEBE:
Years and years ago at art school, I was dissuaded from painting. All I wanted to do was be a painter, but I was dissuaded from painting by a white man tutor. I was painting my sister, and he was like, ‘I don't really get what you're trying to say. You should make her blacker.’ And I said, ‘But she's not blacker,’ and he said, ‘Yes, but if it was a portrait of a Black woman, I would know what you were saying. What I suggest you do is stop buying paint and instead spend your money on Miles Davis records and go and hang out in Brixton.’
JOSH:
Whoa.
PHOEBE:
And I was too young at the time to know how to critically fight back, and I was much less conscious at the time—I didn't grow up here, and I didn't grow up in a predominantly white place, so I didn't have the language at all to know what conversation I was actually having at the time. I just knew what he was saying was heinous, but it completely floored me, and it made me really paralysed. And I started to think that I was just very fraudulent because I couldn't fit what he understood to be Black Woman Art—I had nothing to say, and I stopped painting. I didn't paint again after that. I don't owe him anything, but I owe to that moment the fact that I then just spent my time gathering all of these different skills and languages and tools to then have a practice that is very multi-layered. And I'm grateful for not just pursuing painting solidly and going down the route that I thought I would, which was to be a portrait painter of oil paintings. I think I've had a very errant journey in my practice, and I'm glad about that, but something about seeing these people swimming in this pool and helping each other—I was like, ‘I need to reclaim paint.’
The reason I wanted to be an artist was because I love painting so much, and I stopped myself for 20 years. So I decided I'd paint from stills from this shoot that we did, and that's the work. And so this is my first painting show. It's my first show that doesn't have technology or doesn't have any—you know, like it doesn't have a lot of immersive stuff. It is the paintings, and that's what you're given. And yeah, that's what you saw.
JOSH:
I feel very emotional hearing that. Phoebe, I'm so sorry. And also, that is literally the definition of triumph. I was blown away. I wrote to you about it. The blue in Love's Promise to the Weather—I moaned with delight. It is a perfect painting, to my mind. I mean, all of them are, and it had never even crossed my mind that you hadn't been painting since school. And so to know that this—that this process, oh, I’m so emotional because we find ourselves in community, right? In this very process of you engaging with community and learning from them and observing them, you’re provoked to return to the original medium. Phoebe, that's just—it's tremendous. That makes me want to combust into a million pieces. Wow, Phoebe.
This is what I found so breathtaking and breathgiving in [Dionne] Brand’s Verso 55 in The Blue Clerk. The ancestors’ surprise, their utter delight that we who were never meant to survive, ‘are still alive, like hydrogen, like oxygen’.
Christina Sharpe
PHOEBE:
It's a very meaningful show for me. And the other thing about that painting, Love's Promise to the Weather—and the reason why I was… not hesitant about doing this, but when I read what we were going to be talking about, I was … it gave me a little pause because in August 2024, my heart gave way again, and I was in the hospital, and it was very alarming, obviously, and a lot came up from the narrative of the previous time. And then we had to decide whether to do this show.
I was very weak, and the doctor was like, ‘Please don't do it. Don't do anything for six weeks.’ But I came home, and it was a similar feeling of I need to get to the studio or else the old narrative is going to take hold, and so I went to the studio. I could only do anything for about 10 minutes, and I had to lie down and I had to get up again for 10 minutes, and lie down. Love’s Promise to the Weather was not finished, so the first thing I did was finish it—and it wasn't blue before. And it was such a joyous thing, and it just came in such a real way and with no hesitation.
So I love that you love that one because that was the one that brought me back to myself again after this next heart thing. I'm reflecting on the first question you asked—how is your heart?— and it's strange to think about it because it's tested me so much, and in many ways it's fragile. I know now because of what's happened to it, it's going to be fragile forever. But at the same time, paradoxically, it's absolutely not. For me, that's what I see in this show: your heart can do miraculous things.
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Busy Being Black transcripts are edited for clarity and readability.
