Liquid Reflections: Liliane Lijn in Conversation with Laurence Sillars

Cultural Collections & Galleries and Poetry@Leeds mark Liliane Lijn’s new memoir and new work responding to her remarkable campus sculpture.

Join University of Leeds Cultural Collections & Galleries and Poetry@Leeds for a celebration of pioneering artist and writer Liliane Lijn’s new memoir, Liquid Reflections, published by Penguin Books, and the first chance to experience Column of Sky, a new work made by J.R. Carpenter in response to Lijn’s remarkable revolving sculpture Converse Column on the University campus.

Based on personal diaries from the time and her working notebooks, Liquid Reflections is a riveting and revelatory portrait of the artist as a young woman.

In 1958, talented and fearless and eighteen years old, Liliane Lijn moved to Paris alone to become an artist.

She befriended artists, painters, poets, gallerists and revolutionaries, as the Surrealists gave way to a burgeoning Pop Art movement. She had disastrous affairs with difficult men. She experimented boldly, creating ground-breaking sculptures with light, text and movement. And even as she cemented her reputation in the vanguard of postwar kinetic art, she was repeatedly told that there are no great women artists.

In 2019, Lijn created the nine-metre-high sculpture Converse Column for the University of Leeds’ Public Art Trail. She returns to campus for a conversation about her life and work with Laurence Sillars (Henry Moore Institute) followed by a reception and book signing.

Artist and poet J.R. Carpenter will perform their brand-new work created in response to Converse Column, and Professor Fiona Becket, author of Contemporary Visual Poetry, Women Writing the Posthuman (Routledge) introduces the evening with a contextual talk.

Liliane Lijn is an artist, poet and writer. From text based kinetic sculptures to large, animated dramas, inspired by science, mythology, and eastern philosophies, Lijn combines industrial materials with artistic processes to reimagine the female body. Her work is held in important public collections, including Tate, Victoria & Albert, British Museum, and FNAC in Paris. She has been exhibited internationally since the 1960s, most recently in Electric Dreams at Tate Modern and OGR, Torino and in the major retrospective Liliane Lijn: Arise Alive at the Haus der Kunst, Munich, touring to mumok, Vienna and Tate St. Ives. Her prose poem Crossing Map received an ACE Award and was published by Thames & Hudson Ltd. Liquid Reflections was first published in 2025 by Hamish Hamilton and is now a Penguin Paperback. Sloowtapes are imminently bringing out a cassette of a selection from her performances. Born in New York, Lijn subsequently lived in Lugano, Paris, New York and Athens before finally settling in London in 1967.

J. R. Carpenter is an artist, poet, and lecturer in Creative Practice at University of Leeds. Their digital poem The Gathering Cloud won the New Media Writing Prize 2016. Their debut poetry collection An Ocean of Static was highly commended for the Forward Prizes 2018. This is a Picture of Wind was listed in The Guardian’s Best Poetry Books of 2020 and featured in the Digital Storytelling exhibition at the British Library 2023. Measures of Weather was The Observer’s Poetry Book of the Month for February 2025 and a finalist for the Laurel Prize 2025. A poem from the collection was published in The Forward Book of Poetry 2026.

Laurence Sillars has been Head of the Henry Moore Institute since 2017. From 2009-17 he was Chief Curator at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead. He was part of the Curatorial Committee for the Liverpool Biennial in 2004, 2006 and 2008.

Fiona Becket is Professor of Contemporary Poetics at Leeds University. Her most recent book is Contemporary Visual Poetry: Women Writing the Posthuman (Routledge, 2025).

Photo: Sophie Wedgewood.