Boyle Family is a group of collaborative artists based in London. Mark Boyle and Joan Hills met in Harrogate, Yorkshire in 1957, Joan a single mother who had left her art and architecture studies to bring up her son and Mark was serving in the army. Within months they were collaborating, initially exhibiting their work under Boyle’s name until their work became widely known and they exhibited as Mark Boyle and Joan Hills. When their children, Sebastian born in 1962 and Georgia born in 1963, began to collaborate with them from the late 1970s onwards, the group became established as Boyle Family.

Boyle Family is best known for the earth studies: three-dimensional casts of the surface of the earth which record and document random sites with great accuracy. These works combine real material from the site (stones, dust, twigs etc) with paint and resins, preserving the form of the ground to make unique one-off pieces that suggest and offer new interpretations of the environment.

Their project ‘Journey to the Surface of the Earth’ was launched in 1968 – 69. After being blindfolded, they threw darts at a world map, in order to pinpoint 1,000 areas of the earth’s surface to duplicate. On travelling to a selected site, the Boyles would throw a T-square in the air to select a random area to replicate.

Visual:

In this image done by the Boyle Family you can clearly see what is the side of the road and part of the pavement next to it. At first glance there’s not much to the image, but with closer inspection you can see all kinds of details and history within the part of the floor they decided to take. You can see every individual texture on the surface, the cracks on the pavement and the light hitting the bumpy surface of the road.

Technical:

The lighting coming from the left side of this image seems a bit artificial, as if coming off of a street light since it’s only lighting up that part of the image and, from what I see, nothing else. As this image is actually a painting replicated from a photo that the Boyles took, it’s hard to asses the technical factors of it but what I can say is that, to take this image which they painted from, it looks like they might have used a long-lensed camera to get that close-up, focused effect in the image.