Descending into Bethnal Green or Notting Hill Gate, something shifts. Between the habitual rhythm of the commute—steps, escalators, the low hum of the Underground—Phoebe Boswell’s we move through scales of blue emerges in fragments. Not all at once, but slowly, as if surfacing.
Installed along the escalators, the work unfolds through four photographic tableaux that resist stillness. Figures appear and dissolve as bodies move past them; the act of viewing becomes inseparable from the act of travelling. There’s a sense of being carried—through image, through space, through something less easily named.
Water runs quietly through Boswell’s practice, and here it gathers weight. Not simply as a visual language, but as a vessel: of resistance, of intimacy, of memory that refuses to settle. It holds contradiction—joy alongside grief, release alongside containment. In this subterranean setting, water feels both present and withheld, echoing the unseen rivers that move beneath the city above.
London’s Underground shares its foundations with a buried network of waterways, a hidden topography that mirrors the visible map commuters navigate each day. Boswell taps into this layered geography, tracing imagined and lived journeys across water—migratory routes that stretch beyond the city, yet remain embedded within it.
To coincide with Phoebe Boswell’s Art on the Underground commission, Ben Hunter is pleased to present four works by the artist at the Ben Hunter gallery March – 15 April 2026. Boswell’s recent work has considered the dichotomy of bodies of water as both repositories of painful historical experience
The work is shaped in part through a public call-out to swimming communities around Bethnal Green and Notting Hill. The figures who inhabit these images carry their own relationships to water: personal, inherited, diasporic. In bringing these bodies into the frame, Boswell continues her wider practice of reclaiming aquatic space for Black diasporic communities—gently unsettling who is seen, and who is remembered, within these environments.
There is no fixed beginning or end to we move through scales of blue. It exists in passing moments: a glance, a pause, the brief suspension between one place and another. Like water, it resists containment—moving instead through memory, through bodies, through the city itself.
On view from 25 March 2026
words by Alexa Wang
Image credit: Phoebe Boswell, we move through scales of blue. Photograph by Thierry Bal.
