Mark Boyle (11 May 1934 – 4 May 2005) was a Scottish artist born in Glasgow and known for his work in the cultural UK Underground of the 1960s around the Traverse Theatre, and from 1985 exhibited with Joan Hills and their children Sebastian and Georgia as Boyle Family. Although Boyle Family have worked across a wide range of different media (including painting, photography, sculpture, film, projection, sound recordings and drawing), they are perhaps most well known for their Earth studies. These pictures – highly accurate painted casts that operate somewhere between painting and sculpture – involve the meticulous re-creation of randomly chosen areas of the Earth's surface using resin and fibreglass (as well as real materials collected from the original site) and have been exhibited internationally. Past shows have included the British Pavilion at the XXXIX

Venice Biennale The Venice Biennale (; it, La Biennale di Venezia) is an international cultural exhibition hosted annually in Venice, Italy by the Biennale Foundation. The biennale has been organised every year since 1895, which makes it the oldest of ...

in 1978, ''Beyond Image - Boyle Family'' (

Hayward Gallery The Hayward Gallery is an art gallery within the Southbank Centre in central London, England and part of an area of major arts venues on the South Bank of the River Thames. It is sited adjacent to the other Southbank Centre buildings (the R ...

, London) in 1986 and ''Boyle Family'' ( Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh) - a major retrospective held in 2003. In addition to developing highly original casting techniques, Mark Boyle and Joan Hills also pioneered the use of liquid light shows during the 1960s. These projections played a seminal role in the development of the counter-culture of the period. The ''light environments'' were used to accompany stage performances by such artists as

Jimi Hendrix James Marshall "Jimi" Hendrix (born Johnny Allen Hendrix; November 27, 1942September 18, 1970) was an American guitarist, singer and songwriter. Although his mainstream career spanned only four years, he is widely regarded as one of the most ...

and jazz-rock pioneers

Soft Machine Soft Machine are a British rock band from Canterbury formed in mid-1966 by Mike Ratledge (keyboards, 1966–1976), Robert Wyatt (drums, vocals, 1966–1971), Kevin Ayers (bass, guitar, vocals, 1966–1968) and Daevid Allen (guitar, 1966– ...

. Amongst others he collaborated with are

George Brecht George Brecht (August 27, 1926 – December 5, 2008), born George Ellis MacDiarmid, was an American conceptual artist and avant-garde composer, as well as a professional chemist who worked as a consultant for companies including Pfizer, Johnson ...

, Peter Schmidt (artist), Cornelius Cardew, and John Tilbury.

References

External links

Boyle Family website, including chronology
1934 births 2005 deaths British conceptual artists Psychedelic artists Scottish contemporary artists {{Scotland-artist-stub