Boyle Family Biography

MARK BOYLE was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1934. He studied law for three years as a young man at the University of Glasgow before joining the Scots Guards in 1953. Boyle worked with the Scots Guards for four years. During his student and Army years Boyle developed an interest in poetry and practiced his hand at it when he got the chance.

Boyle met his wife JOAN HILLS in 1957 in Harrogate. They took to each other quickly and moved in together six weeks later. He began painting soon after with supplies that he borrowed from Hills. He had never received formal fine art training and thus this period was Boyle’s first foray into his life as an artist. These first works by Boyle were inspired by a demolition site that he could see from his and Hills’ flat in Harrogate. It was 1959 before Boyle sold his first painting.

In 1963 Boyle had his first solo exhibition at the Traverse Art Gallery in Edinburgh. By the time of this show Boyle and Hills had moved to London and were both experimenting with event, performance and projection art.

Their experiments yielded a rewarding relationship with the band Soft Machine. Boyle and Hills were invited to provide light environments for Soft Machine for the first time in 1966 after the band had seen their performance Son et Lumière for Earth, Air, Fire and Water, at UFO club in London. Later in 1968 Boyle and Hills toured with Soft Machine and Jimi Hendrix across the U.S. and provided light environments for approximately 50 musical performances.

1968 also marks the beginning of his and Hills’ Journey to the Surface of the Earth project. Boyle began the project by inviting random people into his studio. Each participant was blindfolded and asked to throw a dart at a map of the world that he had posted to his wall. One thousand darts were thrown in all. Boyle and Hills planned to then visit each of these randomly selected site and make a reproduction of the earth’s surface at that location. This project consumed Boyle for the rest of his life and is now continued by Hills and his two children SEBASTIAN (Born: March 1962)and GEORGIA (Born: October 1963) who both worked with their parents from a young age.

In the 1970s Boyle and Hills collaborated with Soft Machine for the last time. Boyle continued to work on various projects and was increasingly exhibited internationally. At the end of the decade Boyle represented Britain at the 1978 Venice Biennale.

In 1980s Boyle, Hills and their two children collapsed their separate artistic identities into one collaborative artist group, the Boyle Family. Therefore, though Boyle died in 2005, many projects and initiatives that he began or was involved with, like the Journey to the Surface of the Earth project, have been continued and are still active.