Phoebe Boswell

An alternative history of the British Isles, told through art. Looking at 1,500 years and eight dramatic turning points, acclaimed artists and thinkers encounter key historic art works from across the UK that have shaped the history of the British Isles and inspired their own work.

The extraordinary story of the most disturbing witch trial in British history and the key role played in it by one nine-year-old girl. Jennet Device, a beggar-girl from Pendle in Lancashire, was the star witness in the trial in 1612 of her own mother, her brother, her sister and many of her neighbours and, thanks to her chilling testimony, they were all hanged.

An evocative and imaginative exploration of the racial tensions in Othello and how the themes in Shakespeare's play still resonate today.

“I don’t want to feel like it’s only me. I know it’s not only me, because there are others out there…” ‘I Don’t Protest, I Just Dance In My Shadow’ is a short visual essay film by artist animator, Jessica Ashman, about navigating the visual art and animation world as a black face in a white space. Using animation and recorded interviews of eight other women of colour artists, ‘I Don’t Protest, I Just Dance In My Shadow’ is an abstract confessional from the director herself: a visualisation of the joy, frustration, wishes and dreams of what it feels like to be a black women and a woman of colour artist, creating and existing.

A salute to women in history who have used their bodies in protest when they haven’t been permitted to use their voices, this film reflects upon the collective strength and subversive potential of women standing together and using their voices in collaboration.

A girl in a brothel reminisces and questionins the advice her mother gave her as a child.

'Prologue: The Lizard of Unmarriedness (It's All About How You Tell It)' is the starting point to a multi-sensory body of work in which Boswell uses film, drawing, sound, and interactive sculpture to examine how storytelling, nuance, and language aid our personal predilections towards belief. In the summer of 2014, Boswell spent three months in Zanzibar, researching the island’s prevalent belief in an ulterior ‘spirit world’. Wanting to explore belief systems as a whole, the fundamental notions of why and how we believe, Boswell began to realise as her research progressed that nothing honest was going to come from her vantage point, as a cynical Londoner examining the intricacies of this deeply entrenched East African belief system. She would have to place herself within the work, and explore the frailties within her own body, if she was ever going to make any true and valid work about belief.