Boyle Family present a new time lapse digital film work from their series 'Seeds for a Random Garden'. Boyle Family first registered on the art scene with their spectator-participation 'events' and 'happenings' during the 1960s, which included Joan Hills' Seeds for a Random Garden, a series of suggestions on what to do with seeds collected from random sites around Britain "without the slightest consideration for beauty, utility, edibility, scent, or horticultural interest". For their new work, Charlton project 2006, Boyle Family went to a randomly selected site in a street in the south-east London district, swept up litter and 'planted' it in a box of clean earth. One photograph has been taken of this box every ten minutes, day and night, since the 'planting' last May, with shooting due to finish at the end of November 2006. By then, 28,800 photographic frames will have been taken. The resulting unedited 8 hour time-lapse film will be exhibited for the first time at construction from 3 December 2006. Although the project is a work in progress, with plants sprouting, growing and dying, other elements and life cycles become apparent as days get longer and nights shorter; shadows of leaves on nearby trees emerge and disappear as clouds cover the sun and seasons change. This will be the first film in the Seeds for a Random Garden series, an attempt to include plants and the process of growth into Boyle Family's ongoing project to study, analyse and present reality. Previous works include a piece created for their acclaimed retrospective at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh (2003). Boyle Family are perhaps best known for their meticulous three dimensional casts of randomly selected sections of the surface of the earth. They question whether we can trust our senses and whether it is possible to make an accurate description of any aspect of reality. This is the first Boyle Family solo exhibition since Mark Boyle died in May 2005. Joan Hills and their children, Sebastian and Georgia Boyle, continue to work together. Boyle Family works are also included in several forthcoming group exhibitions: Riflemaker becomes Indica in London; Centre of the Creative Universe at Tate Liverpool and Summer of Love at the Whitney, New York. More information on Boyle Family, including archive material, catalogue essays and illustrated works can be found at www.boylefamily.co.uk

© Boyle Family 2004