An Interview with Boyle Family

The warder lets me into the Gallery of Modern Art at a tense moment: six men, gloved hands above their heads, are straining to hold a 6x12 foot piece of charred ground on its side, complete with concrete slabs, twisted girder, and a rusty old oil drum. Two of the men, Mark Boyle and his son Sebastian, are showing particular concern for the work’s safety, having crafted it lovingly out of resin 13 years ago.

Sebastian, a personable Londoner in his early forties, is quick to tell the handling team when he thinks they’re making the wrong move. He’s conscious that people instinctively treat Boyle Family works as if they really are made out of earth and stone, forgetting their relative fragility. His Glaswegian father Mark, with a disarming smile and a lorry-load of charisma, has the team in the palm of his hand – ‘You should have a comedy show on the Fringe’, one quips, as Mark keeps them all entertained during the stressful task of moving the earth piece from one room to the next.

The work safely fixed to the wall, Mark steps back. “It’s lovely, isn’t it?” he says, full of quiet admiration for this little corner of a Docklands demolition site. “We’d never found anywhere like it before.” I ask, needing to hear it from the horse’s mouth, whether it’s really all artificial. “We always put one real thing in every piece, and that sets the standard. The rest is resin.”

I make a mental note to come back later and see if I can find the one real thing. We race to the café before it stops serving lunch, to be joined soon after by Mark’s Edinburgh-born partner, Joan Hills, and intermittently by their grown up children Sebastian and Georgia, who dash in and out in a tizzy about the lighting, reluctant to leave the hanging process unsupervised. This is Boyle Family.

Settled in with his Irn Bru, Mark starts at the beginning of their story. “When I first met Joan, I was trying to write poems that could include everything. The day we met, introduced by the owner of a café in Harrogate, we had a coffee and we went off for a walk, and we went back and had another coffee, then we went to a Chinese and had two dinners for five and six (that was all we had). I was in the army, she was running a business, and at the end of the dinner we decided quite formally that this was not love at first sight but that we were going to work together for the rest of our lives, on a project which attempted to include anything, and certainly not to exclude anything.”

The pair were initially most active in the avant-garde scene, creating events and happenings, the most notorious of which took place in 1963 in Edinburgh’s McEwan Hall. “There was a thing called the Edinburgh Happening, which we participated in, and we were told that if they got a conviction against the girl who appeared in the nude and against John Calder who’d organised the whole drama festival, they were going to prosecute us next. Fortunately a stout Edinburgh bailiff threw it out as complete nonsense. If ever there was a storm about nothing at all, it was that.”

The same year, with the help and encouragement of Ricky Demarco, Joan and Mark put on the Edinburgh Festival’s opening exhibition at the Traverse Theatre. This year’s show marks 40 years exactly since that exhibition and the couple are bursting with pleasure to be back on display in Scotland. “Oh God, it matters!” enthuses Joan, “You’ve no idea!” “We’re so thrilled to be here,” says Mark. “We’d rather show here than any other place in the world.”

“It really is true that nobody ever forgets that they’re Scottish. We come every year and we work here and we love it, and more than anything else you just regret that you haven’t got the constant company of Scottish people. I would trust my life to a Scotsman, probably unwisely! There’s not many people you would say that about, but there’s a kind of innate honesty about people.”

It’s that innate honesty which informs the work of Boyle Family, the name which the four adopted in 1985 when it became clear that Sebastian and Georgia were as much a part of the creative process as their parents. In their bid to make work which includes everything, the family is as unprejudiced as possible when selecting a subject. 1000 sites have been chosen for their ongoing World Series, by throwing darts, blindfolded, at a world map, and when they reach their destination they throw a set square in the air, reproducing a six foot section of the ground wherever it lands. The resulting earth pieces are meticulously recorded and reproduced, without any imposition of personal style, in an effort to make viewers look again at the ordinary world around them.

“It’s clear to me that reality does have a great deal of power and honesty,” explains Sebastian. “Bacon talked about the brutality of fact, and without necessarily going as far as that, there is certainly a great deal of strength in fact. One of the roles that artists have had throughout the centuries is just bearing witness to the world that surrounds them and almost to take themselves out of the actual art, just to present the world as it is, whether it’s the honesty of Dürer’s great drawing of a clump of earth, or of Dutch still life painting. In a sense we fit into that tradition.”

The World Series, part of Boyle Family’s wider Journey to the Surface of the Earth, was started in 1968, and despite the artists’ fluid approach, the results have been remarkably consistent across the years. “There is no method or technique or material that we used then that we use now – it’s changed completely, says Mark. “The whole project changes all the time and we have no intention of feeling tied down by the original plan, which was after all a plan from the mid-sixties, and now we want something different.”

The family has said in the past that there were certain kinds of site, like the sea, flora and fauna, that they would leave until technology made it possible. I ask whether they have considered using a moving image as a finished piece of work, on a huge plasma screen. Mark becomes coy and I think I’ve hit on something. “We consider everything all the time: we try to work out whether any new technology would solve various problems of ours. We’ve thought of that. I really can’t talk about what we’re doing in the future. It’s on the cards.”

Mark and Joan are no strangers to the moving image: they famously toured America in the late sixties doing psychedelic chemical light shows for Jimi Hendrix and Soft Machine. “We lined up first of all with Soft Machine,” says Joan. “We were really great fans of theirs, and there’s a room in this exhibition about our shows with the band, so I guess there’ll be a lot more fans by the time it’s over.

“Jimi Hendrix joined their management just about the same time as we did, and we toured America with him. He was an absolutely charming man – he was the opposite of the image they created for him. He didn’t like pop music, and he wanted to be a painter.

“We thought he was going to be the answer to all our problems because he and the manager, Mike Jeffries, were going to start an art centre in New York which would have jazz (which Jimi loved), rock, classical music, visual arts and drama. We thought that was an absolutely great idea and much better than going into New York at the behest of some gallery which would want to impose itself upon you no matter how hard they tried not to. But then of course Jimi died and Mike Jeffries died and so the whole thing came to an end. It was a tragedy.”

Today the couple, all in black, are the picture of well-heeled London chic, but you can tell they haven’t forgotten what it’s like to be poor. “Many times we stood there having got the show on and everybody’s saying it’s wonderful, and we would whisper to one another, ‘have you got the bus fare home?’”

London-born Sebastian and Georgia have lived through plenty of hard times with their parents, but it never put them off being part of the team. “It’s hard to rebel against these people, when they’re just saying ‘Yeah, do anything’,” laughs Sebastian. They didn’t necessarily want us to work with them, but they didn’t exclude us from their lives either. So Georgia and I, and Cameron, our older brother, were very aware of the scene, whether we were broke, or doing okay, or whether there was a gallery owner coming round who might offer us a show abroad.

“It’s a bit like the scene now – we’ve got an opening next week and we’re all working away like mad. We’re very excited about it. This is about as good a Boyle show as you’re ever going to see.”

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 17.08.03