AT HOME WITH THE BOYLE FAMILY
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
AT HOME WITH THE BOYLE FAMILY is an experimental short documentary that glimpses a formative period in the creative process of Scottish artist couple Mark Boyle and Joan Hills. Including family and friends in their process, the Boyles, through play and experimentation, refused the conventional mode of the heroic male artist in favour of an open, shared practice. Rooted in a performative domestic space AT HOME WITH THE BOYLE FAMILY synthesises the Boyles' innovative visual world - at once psychedelic, cosmic and yet utterly founded in material processes.
It features interviews with Joan Hills, her son with Mark, Sebastian Boyle plus artists Gustav Metzger and William Raban.
While set in the early 1960s, the film compresses time between the historical and the contemporary. A painstakingly researched hybrid of analogue and digital techniques, both visual and aural, its subtext is the origin of the immersive media experiences of today’s artworld, live concert experiences and mediascape.
Despite its analogue textures, the film disavows both analogue and digital purism, instead embracing a filmic-digital hybridity closer to the spirit of experimentation that the Boyles' practice embodies.
We chose not to use archive footage but to bring the story to life in the moment. The creation of the film was heavily research-based; its visuals were made with vintage projectors and with much trial and error. We appropriated the original model of slide projector used by the Boyles to chemically excite inks and melt slides (as well as filming through a microscope and adopting other related aspects of their practice). The intention being to take ourselves as makers and our audience on a voyage of discovery, through these happy accidents of history into the perceptual immediacy of the cinematic present.
The austere postwar period is evoked with hand-processed 16mm film shot at the original locations. The film’s titles were digitally designed using a carefully chosen period font, optically exposed onto slide film then digitally re-captured as the slide was physically melted in the projector gate.
A salient subtext is that of urban gentrification and the environment in which it is possible for artistic practice to thrive. The film is set where the Boyles, an artist couple with no money just starting a family, lived while innovating their key work. Kensington, an area of West London, is now a playground of the extremely wealthy and no longer economically conducive to sustaining a non-commercial artistic practice. The extent to which anywhere in contemporary London enables unfettered artistic experimentation is one of the film’s fundamental themes.
It features interviews with Joan Hills, her son with Mark, Sebastian Boyle plus artists Gustav Metzger and William Raban.
While set in the early 1960s, the film compresses time between the historical and the contemporary. A painstakingly researched hybrid of analogue and digital techniques, both visual and aural, its subtext is the origin of the immersive media experiences of today’s artworld, live concert experiences and mediascape.
Despite its analogue textures, the film disavows both analogue and digital purism, instead embracing a filmic-digital hybridity closer to the spirit of experimentation that the Boyles' practice embodies.
We chose not to use archive footage but to bring the story to life in the moment. The creation of the film was heavily research-based; its visuals were made with vintage projectors and with much trial and error. We appropriated the original model of slide projector used by the Boyles to chemically excite inks and melt slides (as well as filming through a microscope and adopting other related aspects of their practice). The intention being to take ourselves as makers and our audience on a voyage of discovery, through these happy accidents of history into the perceptual immediacy of the cinematic present.
The austere postwar period is evoked with hand-processed 16mm film shot at the original locations. The film’s titles were digitally designed using a carefully chosen period font, optically exposed onto slide film then digitally re-captured as the slide was physically melted in the projector gate.
A salient subtext is that of urban gentrification and the environment in which it is possible for artistic practice to thrive. The film is set where the Boyles, an artist couple with no money just starting a family, lived while innovating their key work. Kensington, an area of West London, is now a playground of the extremely wealthy and no longer economically conducive to sustaining a non-commercial artistic practice. The extent to which anywhere in contemporary London enables unfettered artistic experimentation is one of the film’s fundamental themes.