Liliane Lijn
Eugenie Absalom – Interview - Artist Liliane Lijn
- Could you tell me,
please, about your childhood and your family?
- I was born in New York
City in 1939. Both my parents were born in Russia, my mother in
Minsk and my father in a small town near the Polish border. Due to
my grandfather’s foresight, they all became Cuban citizens in the
early 1930’s, which made it easier for them to become US citizens
when they finally left Europe about 1938. I have
one brother, who is a teacher in Tampa, Florida.
When I was a child we were a
multi-lingual family and between them my parents spoke 6 different
languages.
One thing that I remember
from my childhood is that I grew up longing for light.
The quality of light is different in New York.
There are a lot of skyscrapers there.
Our flat was on the 4th
floor and it was never full of sunshine. Light
was always very important to me. It has been a
lasting source of my inspiration as an artist.
Since 1966, I have lived in
England. At present I spend time both in London
and Perugia in Central Italy.
I have two sons and a
daughter. One son lives in New York and the other
one in London. Both are software designers.
My daughter is a teacher at primary school.
- Did you attend art
school or university?
I was 14 year old when I
went to Europe and studied in Lugano at an Italian grammar school.
I moved on to study Archaeology at the Sorbonne and Art
History at the Ecole du Louvre in Paris.
My influences in Paris were
Dada, Surrealism, Constructivism - many artistic
movements were flourishing in Paris at that time.
I was 17 when I decided to
become an artist. At that time I met again an old
friend of mine, whom I had known when I was 10 year old.
She was a budding surrealist painter and we
met by chance in Venice.
I was drawing a lot then – it was what I really wanted to do.
The more I was doing it – the less I wanted to go to school.
- Did your parents
encourage you to become an artist?
- My father wasn’t very keen
on visual arts - he wanted me to do something else.
So I started to study Archaeology.
He didn’t take visual art seriously.
- Did your professors
have any influence on you?
- One professor – yes, he
was my private coach in Italian. We never really
studied Italian, we talked about art and politics all the time.
He encouraged me to become an artist.
I finished A-levels in three
months studying by myself and cut short my studies by a year and a
half.
- How did you approach
starting career as an artist?
- In 1959 there wasn’t such
a thing as an artistic career. We thought about learning, about
becoming great artists. It wasn’t a business the
way it is nowadays. People thought more about ideas.
The target was to develop oneself. Fame
and fortune may have been important to us but were more like
fantasies.
I didn’t go to art school so
I had to work by myself and compared myself with already established
artists. I dedicated all my time to art.
- If you were not an
artist – what would have been your choice in life?
At 18 I had a very large
spectrum of interests. I might have been an
actress. I had good looks and confidence for that.
- Please tell me about
your exhibition Stardust Ruins and the mysterious Aerogel.
- I would like to give
special thanks to Professor Andrew Westphal at Space Sciences
Laboratory (SSL), the University of California and Steven Jones at
Jet Propulsion Laboratories (JPL), Pasadena for making my work with
Aerogel possible.
I first made the discovery
of Aerogel in the summer of 2005, during my residency at the SSL,
Berkeley. Professor Andrew Westphal, Director of
the Stardust Project, explained me the aim of the mission and showed
me a very small cube of almost invisible material, whose role would
be to collect both cometary and interstellar dust.
It was 98% air. Once collected, cometary
and interstellar dust will provide information about the origins of
the solar system and possibly the origins of the universe.
“In outer space, far beyond
the planet Mars, both interstellar and cometary dust particles,
travelling at 6 km per second, bombard delicate Aerogel tiles,
forming conical crystalline caverns that cradle fossils from other
worlds.” (Liliane Lijn ‘Stardust’ Catalogue, Riflemaker and the
Artist, 2008. Printed in outer space.) We
are talking of dust the size of microns– something very small, not
something that you can see with a naked eye.
Aerogel is extremely fragile
and it easily fragments when handled. It made me
think that fragmentation was an important aspect of the project and
the idea of ruins took hold of me. My vision of
Aerogel as ‘ancient ruins’ was fully supported by Andrew Westphal.
“The dust is incredibly ancient,” he said.
“A million times older than a Greek temple. We are really like
fossil hunters…” ( Liliane Lijn ‘Stardust’ Catalogue, Riflemaker and
the Artist, 2008. Printed in outer space.)
During my 3 months in
Berkeley as the first artist in residence there during the summer of
2005, my primary occupation was research – speaking to and
interviewing the scientists. There were 150 scientists at SSL, doing
research in Solar Physics, Space Weather, the earth’s magnetic field
and the solar wind’s influence on our atmosphere. They were my
working environment.
- What
was the outcome of your residency at SSL?
- The
outcome of my residency at SSL was a new project called Solar
Hills. It is a collaboration with astronomer
John Vallerga.
John and I
have been developing Solar Hills now for 3 years. Solar
Hills are large-scale solar installations that use sunlight to
delineate the horizon with very bright points of light, as bright as
the sun. A Heliostat stops the sun and reflects
the rays into a magnificent rainbow that can be seen for for 3-15
miles.
- Does it
work like solar battery?
The project is not
functional. We are using the sun to raise the
awareness of the natural beauty of our planet.
It gives people cosmic
consciousness. You can’t care about the planet
without feeling that you are living on one.
Partnership funding from the Arts Council England and the Gulbenkian
Foundation made the Solar Hills project
possible.
- What galleries and
museums represent your work?
- My work
is represented in public and corporate collections in Britain,
including Tate, Victoria and Albert Museum, British Museum and Arts
Council England.
International collections
holding my work include FNAC, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York;
Art Institute of Chicago; Art Gallery of New South Wales and the
Kunstmuseum, Berne.
Liliane Lijn works in a
broad range of materials and media, making extensive use of new
technologies to create art which views the world as energy.
She uses movement, sound and light to unveil invisible forces
and discover relationships between space and time.
Exhibition review and
interview: Eugenie Absalom
eugenieabsalom@aol.com