Interview: Sebastian Boyle - Coming to the Boyles

Published on Thursday 15 October 2009 18:58

SEBASTIAN Boyle looks around the art gallery, at the meticulous sculptures of rain-slicked cobbles and concrete paving, and sees his family's history. "It's my life," he says quietly. "It's our lives."

The current exhibition at Edinburgh's Bourne Fine Art is a rare chance to see early works by Boyle Family: Mark Boyle and Joan Hills, who were later joined in their artistic collaboration by their children, Sebastian and Georgia. Best known for their earth studies, which document randomly chosen patches of ground in obsessive detail, they are acclaimed all over the world.

Sebastian, now 47, looks at a sculpture of a cobbled street in Shepherd's Bush made in 1966 and sees how it all began.

"Mark and Joan were trying to figure out what they were doing," he says. "They didn't even have a car then, so they made work close to home. Shepherd's Bush and Holland Park were poor then, there was a lot of demolition going on."

Sebastian was three when the Shepherd's Bush sculpture was made. But he and Georgia, who is 18 months younger, started working with their parents almost as soon as they could hold a paintbrush. "They used to credit us with helping out. As a surly teenager I thought: 'Oh come on, I couldn't do that!' But now I've got my own daughter who's two, I know exactly how I must have been as a three- or four-year-old, saying, 'I want to do that, let me have a go'. And they'd say, 'Of course, you have a go'. Mark once said, 'You guys came up with some of the best little inventions that we had'."

At the same time, the family kitchen was the laboratory for the Boyles' experimental work with slide projection, which would put them (albeit unintentionally) at the heart of psychedelic London. A series of short films of these works will be shown as part of Running Time at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, a major survey show of Scottish film and video art. Though London-based, Mark (originally from Glasgow) and Joan (from Edinburgh) were always happy to be considered Scottish artists.

Sebastian welcomes the chance to see this lesser known aspect of the family's work celebrated alongside artists such as Eduardo Paolozzi and Douglas Gordon. "People have forgotten about those works because we're better known for the earth pieces. When you see that they were making films and making the earth pieces at the same time, you get a sense of a bigger project."

This bigger project is about seeing – really taking time to see, whether it's a meticulous rendition of a patch of gravel in resin and fibreglass or a slide of teardrop crystallising. The kinds of things we don't normally look at. Ordinary things made extraordinary.

"How often do we ever really look at anything?" Sebastian says. "Mark and Joan were very aware that they wanted to be completely alive, interested in things, seeing them as they are. They felt that if you went around choosing things you were interested in, inevitably you would be biased in the way that you looked at them, and that you should try to be more objective.

"Now I've got my own child, I see that a lot of Mark and Joan's ideas come from the reaffirmation you get when you have kids, their total openness to the world. They're equally interested in everything. It's actually what we should all be like. It's core to the whole way of thinking."

An early series of ground sculptures paved the way for the World Series, so-called after friends threw darts in a map of the world to choose 1,000 random locations. Though it was too ambitious ever to be completed – and oceans, for example, proved impossible to sculpt – 42 World Series pieces have now been made. Since Mark Boyle's death in 2005, the remaining members of the family have vowed that the work will continue.

The projection work explored similar ideas. Acquiring a second-hand slide projector in the early 1960s, the Boyles set about experimenting with vision: they watched a slide burning, and a drop of water boil and evaporate as steam. This lead to a series of "Son et Lumiere" (sound and light) works, creating projections involving everything from live worms to bodily fluids extracted in front of a live audience.

First performed for a handful of friends, these works were so successful that they were repeated for larger audiences. The images of exploding colours struck a chord with the music culture of the 1960s and Mark and Joan were invited to provide the psychedelic light show for cult nightclub UFO, frequented by the likes of Pink Floyd, Pete Townshend and the Rolling Stones. Later they collaborated with the band Soft Machine and accompanied them on Jimi Hendrix's first US tour.

"Actually, they hated that tour, hated the whole big music business thing," says Sebastian. "It just wasn't their scene at all and they got out of the music business after that. Georgia and I were very small then, and I think they realised at the end of that tour that they had to concentrate on working with their family. Looking back, that was the beginnings of Boyle Family."

He and Georgia travelled with their parents to make ground sculptures in different parts of London and later – when they acquired a van – further afield. They became involved in the work so naturally that it seems neither has ever questioned their decision as adults to be part of the family enterprise.

"Mark and Joan weren't precious about the work. Even when Georgia and I were six it was always our work too. We were all learning together. Everybody's attempts to solve the problem were equally valid. It was a cross between play and an artist's laboratory. But it was serious as well and we knew it was serious – serious but with a sense of humour.

"Working with your family had and has all the advantages and all the disadvantages that you would expect. We are all willing to go that much further, go beyond the call of duty. But the disadvantage is that maybe we all know each other a little bit too well.

"People maybe have this idea that we were this happy Swiss Family Robinson kind of thing, when of course we had just as many arguments as any other family. It was just that they tended to be about colours and projects and having to do certain deals that you maybe didn't want to have to do."

So artistic fights rather than domestic ones? "As well. It would all merge into one nice stew. Over 40 odd years there are good, interesting simmering issues!"

Sebastian says that the more he reflects on Boyle Family history, the more he realises the importance of their Scottish heritage.

"There are echoes of ideas that have long roots in Scottish thought. We have the reputation of being independent artists, of representing ourselves," he says. "There's a Scottish tradition of being independent awkward buggers – in the art world we're considered a bit like that. I always remember when Georgia and I would come down into the studio to start work, there would be a whisper of Mark saying, 'Here come the English'. And we'd then give him a kicking and say, 'Oh, you've missed a bit.' The humour gets you through a lot of things."

Just six months after the major retrospective at the National Galleries of Scotland in 2003, Mark Boyle suffered a major stroke. "I remember joking with him saying, 'You know, retrospectives are bad for your health,'" says Sebastian, wryly. "And then that (the stroke] happened. He was in a really bad way, he had to learn to walk again and to write, but over the next year he managed to recover a lot, he was back working, we were making plans." Unfortunately, in 2005, Mark suffered an aneurysm, which proved fatal.

But Joan, Georgia and Sebastian are continuing the family's work. Two World Series pieces which were under way when Mark died have now been finished. The second, from the island of Barra, will be exhibited in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art next year. Further new works are also now under way.

"There was never a question of not carrying on," Sebastian says. "We feel like we've only just scratched the surface even now after 45 years."

&#149 Boyle Family: Works from the 1960s and 1970s is at Bourne Fine Art until 31 October. Running Time is at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 17 October until 22 November (programme changes weekly)

FAMILY TIMELINE

1957: Mark Boyle and Joan Hills meet in Harrogate and move in together. Boyle starts painting for the first time.

1961: Make their first assemblages.

1962: Sebastian born in March. First projection experiments.

1963: First exhibitions in London, and Edinburgh in the recently-opened Traverse Theatre. Take part in controversial "happening" during International Drama Conference in Edinburgh's McEwan Hall, when a naked woman is pushed around the balcony in a wheelbarrow. Georgia born in October. Start working in film.

1964: First random earth studies on a demolition site at Shepherd's Bush.

1966: First Son et Lumiere events. Begin to perform light shows at cult nightclub UFO and to collaborate with the band Soft Machine.

1968: Tour the United States with Jimi Hendrix and Soft Machine.

1969: Journey to the Surface of the Earth show at ICA, which launched the World Series.

1978: Represent Britain at the Venice Biennale. Work includes vastly enlarged electron microscope photographs of Mark's hair.

1985: First show as Boyle Family.

1986: Major retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, London.

1999: Sebastian Boyle opens Boyle Family project space in London.

2003: Major retrospective at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

2005: Death of Mark Boyle.

2010: World Series sculpture from Barra to be shown in Edinburgh.