Sonia Boyce: Feeling Her Way
What does freedom sound like? What happens when strangers come together to improvise, to listen, and to play without a script or rehearsal? In Feeling Her Way, acclaimed British artist Sonia Boyce invites visitors into a world shaped by improvisation, shared authorship, and collective expression.
Celebrated with the Golden Lion for Best National Participation at the 2022 Venice Biennale, this powerful installation brings together overlapping vocals, colour-tinted video, glittering sculptures, and layered visual environments. The exhibition invites you to slow down, to listen closely, and to let yourself feel your way through.
Boyce’s work has long explored the intersections of identity, memory, and performance. Feeling Her Way grows out of her ongoing Devotional Collection – a long-running project she began in 1999 after asking a group of women in Liverpool, England if they could name a Black female singer they have grown up with. The silence that followed was striking. “It really did take about ten awkward minutes before anyone could name someone,” she recalls.
What began as a short-term project turned into decades of collecting names, albums, cassettes, and memorabilia – an evolving archive built not just from Boyce’s own knowledge, but from public contributions. “It became a collective memory project,” she says, “where people started to remember songs, share stories, and bring me the names they have forgotten.”
At the heart of the exhibition is a one-day session at Abbey Road Studios, where four acclaimed female musicians – Tanita Tikaram, Jacqui Dankworth, Poppy Arusha, and Sofia Jernberg – met for the first time. There were no rehearsals. No plan. Just a camera crew, a composer (Errollyn Wallen), and an invitation of coming into this space and creating something together.
“There’s always a bit of anxiety in the beginning,” Boyce says. “These performers are used to preparing, rehearsing, perfecting. But here, they were stepping into the unknown – feeling their way.“
What unfolded was magical. Voices rose in spontaneous harmony. Riffs and rhythms emerged organically. At one point, the women were invited to each say or sing, “I am a queen.” It started quietly. Then – laughter. Confidence. Play. The room exploded in vocal energy. The resulting four-channel video installation captures these unscripted moments not as performance, but as transformation. Strangers becoming collaborators. Hesitation giving way to joy.
“It became competitive, funny, raw. Their extended vocal ranges came alive. It was electrifying.”
– Sonia Boyce
Beyond the video, the installation immerses visitors in texture and light. Golden, mirrored sculptures offer flickers of your own reflection, incorporating visitors into the exhibition itself. Wallpaper designed by Boyce pulses with geometrical patters and colour. Archival memorabilia lines the walls – objects sourced from thrift shops and family collections that honour the perhaps overlooked lives and legacies of Black British women in music.
This idea – that viewers are not passive observers, but their participation is core to Boyce’s practice. Collage is not just visual for her. It’s conceptual. Sound, space, people, objects, memory are all brought together in ways that invite dialogue rather than control.
Boyce is known for her collaborative approach. She steps back as a director, making room for others to lead. “People often say, ‘Are you being generous?’” she reflects. “But actually, the people I work with are giving much more than I am. I create the conditions and they fill the space with their own power.”
Feeling Her Way was created in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the work is as much about presence as performance. About breathing. About being alive together. “It’s not just in your head,” Boyce says. “It’s in the body.”
While this is Boyce’s first time showing in Nova Scotia, she is curious about the local resonance of her work. “I don’t know the Halifax community well… but I imagine there are shared concerns around history, memory, recognition that echo across places.”
“Some of these issues around legacy, around who gets named and who’s left out exist not only in the UK, but across North America too,” she notes. “It’s been incredibly meaningful to see how the work lands differently in each place.”
“I hope people feel a sense of connection. That they feel the energy of these performers. That they feel alive in the space. Even if they don’t have words for it.”
– Sonia Boyce
If you leave humming a tune, smiling at a flicker of glitter, or seeing your own reflection differently – that is exactly what the work hopes to offer. Feeling Her Way is not about arriving at one fixed meaning. It’s about allowing yourself to be moved emotionally, physically, even unexpectedly. It’s about moments of joy, recognition, and connection that can’t always be explained, but are deeply felt. In a space filled with sound, memory, and presence, sometimes the most powerful response is simply to feel something and carry that feeling with you.
About the Artist
Sonia Boyce DBE RA (London, UK) emerged in the 1980s as a key figure in the Black British Art Movement. Her recent art practice is primarily concerned with the production and reception of unexpected performative gestures, with an underlying interest in how the personal, the aesthetic, and the political intersect. In 2019, the artist received an OBE for services to art in the Queen’s New Year Honours List, as well as an Honorary Doctorate from the Royal College of Art. In 2016, Boyce was elected a Royal Academician, and received a Paul Hamlyn Artist Award. Between 2012 – 2017, Boyce was Professor of Fine Art at Middlesex University and since 2014 she has been a Professor at University of the Arts London, where she holds the inaugural Chair in Black Art & Design. A three year research project into Black Artists and Modernism culminated with the 2018 BBC Four documentary Whoever Heard of a Black Artist?, exploring the contribution of overlooked artists of African and Asian descent to the story of Modern British art.
Her work is held in the collections of Tate, London, UK; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Saastamoinen Foundation, Helsinki, Finland; Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK; Arts Council Collection, London, UK; The Government Art Collection, London, UK; British Council Collection, London, UK and Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, UK.
Image 1: Installation view, Sonia Boyce: FEELING HER WAY, 2024, PHI Foundation. From top to bottom: Sonia Boyce, FEELING HER WAY, 2022; Untitled (gold structures), 2022 © DACS, London / CARCC Ottawa 2024 / © Fondation PHI pour l’art contemporain, photo: Richard-Max Tremblay.
Image 2: Installation view, Sonia Boyce: FEELING HER WAY, 2024, PHI Foundation. Sonia Boyce, Devotional Collection, 1999-ongoing; Gold wallpaper, 2022 © DACS, London / CARCC Ottawa 2024 / © Fondation PHI pour l’art contemporain, photo: Richard-Max Tremblay.
Image 3: Sonia Boyce, Feeling Her Way: “Instant Singer-Songwriter”, 2022, photo: Stoo Metz Photograph.
Image 4: Sonia Boyce, Feeling Her Way: Digital Pigment Prints, 2022, photo: Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.