Lady of the Wild Things

Abigail Susik speaks with visual artist Liliane Lijn about her new memoir and her major international exhibition.

By Abigail SusikJune 15, 2025

• Art & Architecture

• Memoir & Essay

LILIANE LIJN is a London-based artist and writer. Starting in the late 1950s, Lijn’s visual art practice exploded tradition and defied categorization with its singular approach to materials, construction, and vision. Reaching toward the intangible while simultaneously awakening sensual tactility, Lijn’s work demands that we think beyond art history’s master text. After 60 years of neglect by the male-dominated art world, her essential contribution is finally being recognized on an international level.

Between May and September 2024, Haus der Kunst Munich hosted Lijn’s first major institutional retrospective, Arise Alive. The exhibition then traveled to mumok Vienna and, on May 24, opened at Tate St Ives, in a show that will run until early November. This essential exhibition, one of the most important of the year, challenges viewers with its diversity of media, including light-based, text-based, electronic, and figurative formats. The opportunity to witness Lijn’s early experiments in kinetic text—key artworks of the 20th century—should not be missed.

This spring, Lijn also published her memoir, Liquid Reflections, with the Hamish Hamilton imprint; it tells the story of her development as a young artist over a decade starting in the late 1950s. With harrowing intimacy, Lijn’s account reveals her experiences in an era when sexism was the norm. Meeting William Burroughs, Man Ray, Méret Oppenheim, and so many others, Lijn cut a path across American, British, and European postwar art scenes, even while her search for self-driven meaning was continually thwarted by this masculine milieu.

I spoke with Lijn on Zoom about the interconnectedness of life and art as reflected in her memoir and artist’s retrospective.

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ABIGAIL SUSIK: I was able to visit your spectacular traveling retrospective at mumok in Vienna before it closed in early May. It was an interesting experience to read your memoir directly on the heels of that viewing. As a woman, I was strongly empathetic with the intensely personal content of your memoir, especially the many episodes of sexism and misogyny that affected you, often at the most intimate levels. Your account of sexual discovery and the experience of motherhood at a very young age tells a story about your development as an artist that cannot be gleaned from a museum space, no matter how thoughtful or thorough the installation. For many decades now, art history has often held the artist’s biography at arm’s length. Is that rift something you sought to circumvent with your memoir?

LILIANE LIJN: I’m very interested in what you say about connecting the artist’s life and work, because it’s a male thing to separate, full stop. Everything in the male world is separate, especially your life and work. That was why, for example, when I got pregnant and I was in New York, it was a problem, because getting pregnant meant that you were not serious. An artist does not get pregnant, because serious artists are men, and they don’t get pregnant.

Well, it’s all bullshit. Because in fact, life and art and whatever you do, whether art or science, should be connected. The more we connect everything, the better it is. It’s a big struggle now, even in science. Scientists literally cannot understand each other and are forced to talk with their hands. It’s the same in the arts. A conceptual artist and a figurative artist don’t understand each other. There’s a lack of understanding because of the need to separate and categorize everything.

Now, I’m not saying that it’s negative altogether, because separation is one of the ways that we rationalize and understand the world. But I think, at a certain point, you also need to connect. The connection between an artist’s life and work is vital, as is shown by many biographies of artists, like Hilary Spurling’s biography of Matisse, for example, and many others. That’s one of the reasons why a large retrospective is so fascinating: you see the chronology of an artist’s work and a view of their life as an artist.

The question of an artwork’s autonomous will to form, according to art historians like Alois Riegl, blatantly neglects the imprint of the artist’s lived experience, the most immediate context for an object’s production. Your work is so often about intangible or ephemeral sensual impressions related to optics, haptics, and sound. Could we also say that your practice pays witness to the life of the object, so to speak?

My memoir, Liquid Reflections, is about the development of my early work during the late 1950s and into the 1960s. It intertwines my struggles as a young woman with my explorations into different materials and media. My book ends when I’m 26, just as I’m transforming those early speculations and works with light, photons, reflections, and shadows into a major work, Liquid Reflections (1967). That piece was the finale of many ideas that I couldn’t take much further. And so, my work changed.

That’s when I started experimenting with cylinders wound with copper wire. I discovered this phenomenon in Athens. If the matrix—or, let’s say, the body—of the cylinder itself has a bend or fault in it, and it’s wound with wire, every single line of winding becomes reflected light, creating a line, and that line changes according to the information on the cylinder.

I realized that this was like a language. The cylinder was talking. I had discovered a multidimensional code that transmitted form. I could see every change on that cylinder without moving, which is seeing form. That’s what form is: the changes in whatever material you observe. The changes made to it create a form, and if you take a simple form, a geometrical form like a cylinder, every change to its surface is then transmitted as code. Well, nobody understood that at all.

You engaged with cylinders ever since your development of the first Poem Machines in 1962. Yet the introduction in 1964–65 of cylinders wound with extremely fine enameled copper wire, placed on turntables rotating at constant speeds, shifted to a different synesthetic register that allowed the visual perception of an index, such as a dent, to become information. In your memoir, that entire body of work is shown to be the result of a chance incident, a random sensory experience, which also happened to be the case for many of your artistic forays. Do you think this incidental quality of your artistic process and the content of your work is part of why the art establishment has failed to sufficiently recognize your oeuvre until recently? Or is the ubiquity of sexism equally responsible?

My work has always been challenging to classify. The French gallerist Denise René admired my work but wouldn’t take me on because she said my art was too lyrical. It needed to be more constructivist, in her mind.

I’m 85 and I’m only getting some attention now. As a friend of mine said, women are never old enough.

Nowadays, it is good that women relate more to each other. In the past, we often looked to men. I wasn’t even sure I was a woman. Was I a woman or was I a boy? I didn’t know. I was so split, because my mind was not where I was told women’s minds should be. That was brought home to me most forcefully when I had my first child, Thanos. I was very young, nearly 21, and I was emotionally very young. My partner, Takis, was totally uninterested. His idea—devoid of feeling—was to send our son off to live with his mother.

In that sense, I was very strong. My work was the only area in which I felt sane. I had to pursue that completely single-mindedly, because everything else could destroy me. I’m not saying I wasn’t fully sane. But I did feel that it was a very destructive world for women, especially women with energy and spirit. There were a lot of women who just collapsed. I think of my friend Nina Thoeren, the daughter of the esoteric artist associated with surrealism, Manina. Nina was murdered and died so young … terrible, terrible. To me, that was symbolically potent, as well as being a tragic reality, because I felt that destruction was a woman’s destiny physically, emotionally, and mentally. Nina was a brilliant woman; I’m sure she would have been a remarkable artist or scientist.

The story of your friendship with Nina and her murder is one of the most tragic moments in your memoir. As a scholar of surrealism, I was struck by your account of Manina’s strength in the wake of her daughter’s death, including her decision to travel to the United States to plead for the murderer’s life and the dismissal of the death sentence. Despite the seemingly endless recovery of female surrealists by the art market these days, for better or for worse, Manina is one artist who remains totally overlooked. She has been nearly forgotten, even though her remarkable resilience enabled her to continue making work in the face of the ultimate personal tragedy, the violent death of her child. I was also moved by your account of your friendship and collaboration with the English poet Nazli Nour during the 1960s. We have so few accounts of women working together in this period.

My collaboration with Nazli Nour was amazing. She was incredibly free and open. I had been thinking of using text from newspapers for the Poem Machines. I didn’t originally plan to use poetry for them. I was more interested in just using words. The first ones I did were with the alphabet. Nazli saw the alphabet turning and spinning so that she couldn’t read it very well, and she said, “Oh, I’d love to have my poetry in motion.” I had already read her poetry, so I said nicely, “Your poems are incredibly long. There’s no way I could put the whole poem on the drum.” She replied that she was happy for me to edit her poems to fit my Poem Machines.

Her poems were like stories, but they were written as prose poems—partly sci-fi, with themes of war and astronomy. Other parts were very romantic, almost like fairy tales with a prince and so on. I didn’t like the romantic aspect, so I just stuck to the more sci-fi part of her poetry, which perhaps did not give the whole feeling of it. In any case, I did use a lot of her work, and she kept sending it to me even when she went to India. That journey changed her life because she became a holy woman devoted to spiritual practice. This is somebody who had lived in the most, let’s say, amoral way. But it didn’t matter, because she was enlightened from the beginning. Things that upset other people just washed over Nazli. You must be quite extraordinary to have that ability to let things flow through you. She was very important to me.

Was the movement that the Poem Machines offered the most important thing to you and to Nour? Or was the attraction to these devices more fundamentally based in the machinic aesthetic rather than notions of kinetic art per se?

I have always been interested in the structure and linearity of language and in interrupting that linearity with what you could call poetry. One can allow oneself a kind of freedom in poetry, in contrast with the linearity of prose. I wanted to liberate language. That’s why I started working on the Poem Drums, also called Poem Machines, very emphatically—because it was a break with the elitism of poetry. They were machines, and so I called them machines. But with Poem Machines, words became vibrations.

I was interested in seeing sound, in finding a visual representation of sound and the vibrations of the voice. Then slowly, over a period in the 1960s, I started making cones upon which words floated. I even made transparent Perspex cones so you could see through the words. The words became interconnected through the cone. And of course, you get different apparent velocities using a cone, so words appear to be going faster at the bottom or slower at the top because of the change in diameter.

You’ve already mentioned cut-ups as an important idea for you. Your memoir discusses your interactions with Gregory Corso, William Burroughs, and Brion Gysin, as well as your experiences with various inhabitants of the Beat Hotel in Paris. The synergy with Gysin seems particularly strong to me, and yet his collaborations were so deeply inscribed by a male-oriented social milieu. Can you speak to this connection?

I had been living in New York for almost a year when Brion first developed the Dreamachine. When I returned to Paris, he had already shown the Dreamachine at the English Bookshop. I remember taking a walk with him while he told me about it before I had seen it. There was this strange and extraordinary parallel between his Dreamachine, my Poem Machines, and some of our ideas and visions.

Five or six years ago, at the October Gallery, I saw a drawing he made in 1947 that was incredibly close to some of my drawings from 1959. It was a figurative drawing of the desert and mountains he saw while living in Tangier, Morocco. In his desertscape, you can see geometric prisms. I was amazed by it because it was so close to my early work and my interest in prisms, optics, and spectra. But oddly enough, this connection with Brion wasn’t the kind of influence that people in the art world so often talk about, where one artist sees the work of another. I don’t see anything wrong with being influenced or inspired by another artist’s work. It’s perfectly acceptable. But in the case of Brion and me, it wasn’t direct influence. It was a much more mysterious connection. Or, if you like, it was more of a relation than an influence.

But the cut-ups were something else. I was aware of cut-ups and interested in them. The Beat poet Sinclair Beiles had given me a copy of Minutes to Go, the first anthology of cut-up poetry. The first text I wrote about my work was a cut-up of a description I wrote about my practice, combined with an astronomical text and a text on particle physics. It was published in Signals, a magazine printed by the gallery of that name, a space in London that was open for only two years. Signals was the reason I came to London, because they invited me to have a show. My memoir ends before that happens, although I have written extensively beyond that time in a still-unpublished manuscript.

The time-space manipulations envisioned by Burroughs and Gysin arise for me as you talk. Your work explodes categories in the pursuit of immaterial, effervescent, or inchoate ideas, systems, feelings, and phenomena. The medium or support is never the point. For me, the experience of your work is uniquely multidimensional and resistant to description. Your memoir often grounds this phenomenological elasticity in your own body, bridging the somatic and the cosmic, often in response to the trauma of being a woman in the patriarchy.

The trauma I felt was involved with my body, because, on the one hand, I was developing my work and mind, and on the other, I was reading, seeing, and experiencing a lot. But at the same time, it felt like my body, as a woman, was pulling me down. I wanted to get away from my body. So, my work took the direction of research. With the early Sky Scrolls (1959), I was creating worlds in the sky. When I couldn’t develop these works further, I started playing with new materials like plastics—melting, burning, and spattering.

As an artist, your eyes are always open. You don’t miss anything; everything you see is potential material. For example, when I met the French Olympic ski team by chance, they were trying out a brand-new ski wax. I saw this stuff, and I thought, “That looks interesting. I could play with that.” And in fact, it was exciting, because it led me to see shadows. Of course, I had seen shadows before. But this new material allowed me to see them precisely and realize that, through creating lines on transparent material, there was a shadow behind, and as I moved, that shadow moved. So, then I had movement. And the minute you have movement, you have time. Time and movement are connected because that’s what time is. There isn’t any other time except that which we calculate through little atomic changes, which is movement. Kinesis produces this sense of time, the sun’s movement or the earth’s journey. Our bodies are light-related time machines. Let’s say, then, that change and movement are time envelopes.

For many people who visit your retrospective, including the just-opened installation at Tate St Ives, the fundamental synergy between femininity and technology will likely be apparent on some level. The memoir vastly complements this awareness of the search for a female power far beyond a cyborgian fantasy in your work. What can be said of the desire for female agency with which your work challenges technology, both in terms of media and message?

In the late 1950s, Jean-Jacques Lebel gave me a book by a Buddhist guru and told me that I needed to read it, that it was essential, even though he himself hadn’t read it or even cut the pages. The book’s main question was “Who am I?” That was a very interesting question for a 19-year-old like me. The other thing that I found very compelling was the idea of awareness and waking up from a dream state that one inhabits very much in childhood, in a way, as a protective measure. As a child, I lived in a fantasy world and I wanted to leave that world behind.

In my early work, I was projecting those fantasies so that I could see in new ways. I had visions. I saw things. Woman of War (1986) is a figure I saw in the sky in 1959. She dominated the sky one sunset. She was bird- or insect-like, but obviously female. Unfortunately, the painting I made when I first saw the vision was lost. I still have a very bad photograph of it.

I forgot about it until I was in Paris giving a performance at the Pompidou. Walking back to where I was staying, a strange song came into my head, which I wrote down. I kept singing it because I didn’t want to lose the melody. I didn’t know what to do with the song. It was disturbing. It took me about a year to figure out what it was about. I started drawing, feeling it was about a sculpture. I realized, listening to the words repeatedly, that it was the song of a sculpture. I didn’t give a song to a sculpture. I gave a sculpture to the song. She sings:

I’ve been armoured by your love
I’ve been blasted in your furnaces
And poured into your mould
To fit the Image
To fit the Image 

The song is a warning to humanity.

When I made Woman of War, I had forgotten about that vision in 1959, but the relationship is clear if you look at the photograph of the painting from the late 1950s. Another idea suddenly occurred to me in 1986 when I showed Woman of War and Lady of the Wild Things (1983) at the Fischer Fine Art gallery. Woman of War and Lady of the Wild Things are two different sides of one work. I call the work the Conjunction of Opposites, because Lady of the Wild Things is protective and Woman of War is a warrior, and they’re both feminine.

So, what is the protective female? She was an archetype worshipped as a nymph goddess who protected nature in ancient times, and she survives in some places today, such as India. What’s happened to these archetypes? Jung says that archetypes never die. The more they are repressed, they go underground and become stronger. I believe that the female archetype has gone into the most obscure areas—for example, into energy production. You can even see her if you go to power plants, sparking electricity into the air with her arms raised high. Based on that, I made Electric Bride (1989).

In the 1980s, I became very interested in developing a new image of the female. I wanted to get away from housekeeping and soft sculpture. I wanted to get away from the idea of woman as she is seen. I did it very systematically. I made an extensive series of drawings called She, and then I started creating female figures in which the body became animal, bird, insect, plant, and even machine. The female who embraces all of life!

I feel that spiritual power has been taken away from women. If you think of the Virgin Mary, who is much more popular than Jesus, she is a sexless woman. Women have had their power completely eviscerated. We have that problem partly because we have no female archetype.

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Liliane Lijn is an artist and writer. From text-based kinetic sculptures to large animated installations, inspired by science, mythology, and Eastern philosophies, Lijn’s art combines industrial materials with artistic processes to reimagine the female body. Her work is held in important public collections, including Tate, Victoria and Albert, British Museum, and FNAC in Paris. She has been exhibited internationally since the 1960s, most recently in the major retrospective Liliane Lijn. Arise Alive at the Haus der Kunst, Munich, touring to mumok Vienna and Tate St Ives. Born in New York, Lijn subsequently lived in Lugano, Switzerland; Paris; New York; and Athens, Greece, before finally settling in London in 1967.

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Featured image: Photo of Liliane Lijn by Sophie Wedgwood.