Plinth

The noise of her rhythmic rasping, in and out, in and out, is comforting – the most familiar sound of all, and slightly disconcerting. It’s too personal to hear a stranger’s breath so loud in your ears. We’ve all been scarred by the press of heavy-breather commuters during rush hour on the tube, by the intimacy of anonymous proximity and faceless bodies. When it comes to Boswell, however, her art is the very definition of personal; her body is its source, after all.

The artist’s story of selfhood splays out before me in fresco, sketch and film. At first, it’s a narrative of suffering. The victim of partial blindness in her right eye and torn arterial heart tissue, Boswell’s physical and emotional trauma proves a stimulus for creation. Amongst her oeuvre is footage of her eye surgery at Moorfields Eye Hospital (ouch!) and an angiogram of her heart. For every depiction of herself (there are more than twenty, and not much besides), half-lines and partial erasures speak volumes – in On the Line, 2018, Boswell’s physical fragility is centre stage. Soft charcoal seems a fitting tool: the black shapes, easily rubbed and smudged, seem to rhyme with Boswell’s ideas of herself as something impermanent; mutable.

There’s a touch of Frida Kahlo about the whole thing: (female) artistic practice embodied as both pro- and antagonist. Boswell’s output, however, is remedial rather than painful – no need to grin and bear it here. Free of Frida’s agony-wracked symbolism, Boswell instead creates an arena that feels holistic, tranquil. Hers is a compelling aesthetic, rooted in a masterful command of anatomical line drawing, given wings by a clear instinct for positioning works in space – and for her viewer, in coaxing forth a personal corporeal awareness. The exhibition is a full-body experience: look up to the fresco of self-portraits, register her voice in your ears, move along canals created by six screens on the floor. Stand on a touch-sensitive pad and Boswell’s voice erupts, mingling urgency with rousing command: ‘take me to the lighthouse.’ Is it Woolf’s? Refuge, or viewing tower?

Strength arrives in the form of unlikely reinforcements; 34 drawings of nude women, curvaceous bodies each crowned by a single, spherical eyeball on a stalk, encompass incarnations from dancer to grandmother to baby. What’s striking in She Summons an Army, 2018, is the vivacious agility underscoring each figure’s pose. Femininity breeds strength and amounts to self-preservation here; the artist’s ocularly-gifted heroines seem to compensate for her own half-blindness. A Lady Godiva-type, bolt upright and proud on her horse, personifies the body-in-protest against its own suffering; art as antidote to grief.

Looking down at Ythlaf, 2018 – drone footage of Boswell floating in the Indian Ocean on the shores of Zanzibar – our feelings for her ebb and flow along with the swell. We’ve moved from suffering to watching a kind of recuperation as she lies in the shallows. Her figure is rendered tiny, vulnerable, by our aerial perspective. The womb of water provides a site of continual breaking and renewal, body melting into the sea like a small child in a mother’s arms – drowning, or drifting? Subsumed, or emerging? The questions are lost to an endless marbling of sea and sand over Boswell’s body. Repetition is remedy, and regularity births resolution. Pain, transcended. Wholeness, restored.

Out of the water, I crunch over powdery sand – a thick white crust below my trainers. Brittle yet durable, sand itself suddenly seems a material of the in-between: a shifting substance, blown by wind from one place to the next. Each grain carries its own miniscule history of creation, erosion and dispersion – much like Boswell’s personal history, or anyone’s. Sand is a zone of demarcation, too – that recognisable stripe between land and sea, wet and dry, safety and danger. This is the space between things, and The Space Between Things.

By Claire McQue.