Light, Energy, Movement and Perception: Liliane Lijn

Invisible Worlds explores Liliane Lijn’s enduring fascination with light, energy, movement and perception. Drawing on mythology, poetry, science and technology, Lijn creates kinetic sculptures and interactive installations that investigate the relationship between matter and the invisible. Her practice challenges the boundaries between art and scientific enquiry, exploring how light, movement and language can transform our understanding of the physical world.

Since the early 1960s, Lijn has experimented with industrial materials, mechanical processes and optical effects. Her Poem Machines combine text and movement, transforming words into shifting visual patterns, while works such as Liquid Reflections use light and moving liquids to evoke planetary motion and the forces governing the natural world. Across these experiments, she investigates the relationship between language, perception and material transformation.

Lijn’s work also draws on mythology, Eastern philosophy and feminist thought. From the 1970s onwards, she increasingly explored the female body as a site of transformation, developing sculptural forms that challenge conventional distinctions between the human, animal, botanical and mechanical. Her Female Figures and Cosmic Dramas series, developed particularly during the 1980s, introduced futuristic female archetypes constructed from materials including feather dusters, synthetic fibres, piano wire, steel and optical glass prisms. Combining organic forms with industrial technologies, these works propose alternative representations of femininity while examining the relationship between the body, machinery and cosmic forces.

Light remains a central element throughout Lijn’s practice, functioning not simply as a material but as a means of investigating energy, space and consciousness. Her sculptures and installations frequently explore oppositions between solid and void, transparency and opacity, stillness and motion. This interest extends into large-scale environmental works, including Solar Hills, developed in collaboration with astrophysicist John Vallerga following her residency at the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. Through these projects, Lijn brings artistic experimentation into dialogue with scientific research, making invisible processes perceptible through light, movement and material.

Presented as part of Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions: Matter and Light, Lijn’s talk at the Victoria and Albert Museum surveyed her practice across painting, drawing, sculpture, film and installation, with particular attention to her light-based sculptures of the 1980s. The presentation situated these works within a wider investigation of light, language, technology and the possibilities of a new feminine archetype.