Blood’s Thicker Than Water

Wonderland, Issue 8

“It’s not a cosy co-operative,” said Mark Boyle of his unusual family collective of artists. “It’s four individuals each of whom has a veto.”

Working as a family may set them apart – even make their work harder to grasp or to market. A consensual approach has not, however, limited their impact. They were pioneers of psychedelic projections and can site artists such as Francis Bacon and Gustav Metzger as admirers of their work. Their inventive casting methods anticipated recent techniques used in contemporary art. Yet despite this, the Boyle Family remain outsiders to the art world. Whilst they have continuously shown in museums and galleries worldwide they have never been represented by a gallery.

“Our work tends to interest curators who try to be a bit independent,” they explain, “someone with varied interests who is willing to take a bit of a risk.”

It was in 1957, in a café in Harrogate, Yorkshire that Mark Boyle and Joan Hills first met and within six weeks they were living together. Joan was painting at the time and Mark was writing poems. One day he decided to borrow Joan’s paints and soon after they were making work for each other, of each other, with each other, to show the other one.

Their early works went under mark’s name. “We kept very quiet about any collaboration,” explains Joan “because we really didn’t see how a collector would buy anything made by two people.” They came to London and started creating collages with found materials from the demolition sites that then covered the city. These sites offered a huge amount of free materials to other artists too and work by the French Nouveau Realists, early Pop and assemblage artists in the late 1950s and early 1960s also stemmed from these sites. Mark and Joan were slowly more interested in the actual ground, the surface of the earth as it was, instead of the materials they were taking away. They wanted to see things, as they actually were, which was a very different way of thinking.

The Boyle’s home was always a mixture of studio, house and laboratory, where their three children – Cameron, from Joan’s previous marriage, Sebastian and Georgia Boyle – interacted with the work. “The studio was in the house we lived in so we would see what they were doing,” remembers Georgia. “Our interest would start off with us picking up tools, a hammer or a chisel, then it would just develop.” Sebastian and Georgia became involved in the works from an early age, thinking that the heaps of sand and tools, which sat amongst the assemblages and works in progress were a normal component of any home. On Georgia’s first visit to a friend’s house she was shocked to see this wasn’t the case.

“They had sofas and tables and carpets and curtains but they didn’t have the things that we had hanging on the wall!” she says. Yet it didn’t occur to Sebastian and Georgia to want to do anything else. “Our childhood was different but interesting,” says Georgia. “We would cycle round the city and talk about what we could see or go to the V&A and find a sculpture or a painting.”

In the early 1960s Mark found a second hand projector and alongside making textured collages they started experimenting with materials to project. They wanted their work to offer a multi-sensory experience that hit you from all angles. Liquids such as cola and tizer were poured into slides, their bubbles creating amazing projections. “The materials all came from the kitchen cupboards” smiles Joan. The work was concerned with changes happening in real time – ice to water to steam or simple chemical reactions with materials such as zinc and acid. They were soon organising Son et Lumiere events, with bodily fluids, such as blood, salivia, earwax and semen, which they extracted from themselves, live on stage.

“They wanted to project vomit so Mark made himself sick on stage by attaching a bit of bacon to some string, swallowing it and then tugging it to tickle his throat. He was heaving sick,” recalls Sebastian, as if this was entirely normal. “The sound was captured on his microphone and amplified around the audience. The vomit was then syringed into a slide, creating a golden projection with silvery white balls of saliva on the wall. It looked stunning.”

During the mid-1960s Mark and Joan organised three Son et Lumiere events and almost 250 performances. The then ‘it’ club, UFO, asked them to perform their psychedelic light shows, which are now synonymous with that time. Soon they were creating projections for house bands such as Pink Floyd and Soft Machine. Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones watched from the audience. The idea that their art was being seen in a different context, to a different audience, outside of a gallery thrilled the duo and in 1968 they toured America with Soft Machine and Hendrix.

Indeed, it was in the summer of 1966, only two years earlier, with their show at the Indica Gallery, Masons Yard, London, that Mark and Joan first found themselves in the centre of the counterculture of that time. It was a momentous show for the two of them, who with no formal art training were making their mark as artists, coming up with anything from interactive taste and smell events, to a live performance of strangers having intercourse on stage that was accompanied by a projection of their heartbeats and brain waves on a screen behind them. The focus of these events was always on the projected images and sound of the action, rather than the action itself. “It wouldn’t be out if place now and they were doing it in the 1960s,” says Sebastian.

That is just as well said of The World Series, the Boyles’ biggest ongoing project to date, started in 1968. Guests at the family home were blindfolded and each invited to throw a dart at a map of the world. This continued with visitors to their ICA show the following year until there were 1,000 random dart holes in the map, marking the world sites the Boyles would then travel too. “We wanted to really see how the world is at a particular spot at a particular time,” explains Mark.

The World Series is a huge undertaking and to date approximately 40 of the sites have been visited. There are always other random series on the go each one an attempt to re-create the Earth’s surface with astounding accuracy. “We found what we like doing and stuck to it,” explains Sebastian. “We had to teach ourselves how to make them as no one was making these types of works before.”

In 1978 they were invited to show at the Venice biennale. The entire project was made by Mark, Joan and 14-year-old Georgia, who was excused from school. “I was doing my O’Levels and then flew out after my exams,” says Sebastian. “It was crazy.”

For the show Joan extracted five hairs from Mark’s head, which were enlarged to the size of trees, covering one wall of the gallery. This, like all other Boyle works, from their assemblages to light shows and seed studies, is concerned with their determination to see the world as it is. This determination feeds back into the way they work and support each other. “When you are feeling beaten the others keep you going. We all argue for our ideas and give strength to each other,” says Sebastian.

But there have been inevitable changes and shifts within the family since they started working together four decades ago. “There was this amazing moment in 2004 when we had to say to Mark, ‘hang on, are you mucking that work up?’ and he said ‘oh, no!’. It turned out he needed glasses and that’s one of the unique things of working so closely together – we couldn’t step back to see the changes happening.”

They have travelled across the world from Sardinia to Japan, each trip focusing on making a work and each presenting its own challenges. “It is a wonderful way of seeing the world at random and the works give a real sense of purpose,” says Sebastian. “It is not a democracy. The work is so technical that we argue a lot of the time.” And, like any other family, they are bonded by their over-arching shared experiences. In 2005, Mark suffered a fatal stroke.

“We talk about him everyday as we are making new pieces and retouching old ones. Each work holds a story for us and memories of him being there,” says Sebastian. Blood, clearly, is thicker than water, plaster or paint.