LONDON.- Art on the Underground announced we move through scales of blue , a new series of four large-scale artworks by artist Phoebe Boswell for the escalators at Bethnal Green and Notting Hill Gate stations.

we move through scales of blue expands on Boswell’s recent work exploring water as a container for resistance, joy, remembrance and possibility.

The Tube shares its space beneath the city with a labyrinth of lost rivers and waterways.The River Westbourne runs close to Notting Hill Gate and the River Walbrook to Bethnal Green. Both rivers were diverted underground in the nineteenth century, parallelling the development of the Tube which diverted the flow of passengers beneath London’s surface in the same period.

we move through scales of blue traces the notion of the waterway, evoking aquatic journeys and migratory routes to, from, and within London. Guided by the hydro-feminist view that all bodies of water are connected, the work is conceived as ‘a call to the surface’ – an invitation to a collective consciousness about the world we inhabit. This builds on Boswell’s ongoing practice of reclaiming water for Black diasporic communities, after she encountered the Black Swimming Association’s statistic that 96% of Black British adults don’t swim regularly.

Following a call out to local swimming communities, we move through scales of blue features multi-layered photographic tableaus of Black swimmers who have made London their home, or whose families have migrated here across generations. Participants were photographed under water, responding intuitively to prompts from Boswell. Utilising traditional stop-frame animation techniques, Boswell has layered still images into complex sequences which are brought to life by passengers' movement up and down the escalators.

With we move through scales of blue, Boswell asks us to consider water as a site of endurance, migratory trauma, healing and collective agency.