National Glass Centre

Liliane Lijn, London

Liliane Lijn is a 'New Yorker by birth, a European by education, and a Londoner by choice.' She is a leading pioneer and exponent of kinetic art and continues to experiment with light, movement, words, film, liquids and industrial materials.

Heavenly Fragments combines Lijn's use of a new futuristic material developed for space exploration with the artist's vision of stardust as crumbling ancient cosmic ruins. Her work consists of material that NASA use to collect stardust – Aerogel.

“A disc and a cone of aerogel have broken into fragments. Each installation is an attempt at renewal but can only represent a fragmented memory, a ruin. The video projected onto this installation, Visions of the East, is a compilation of images -memories from my travels in Southern India in 2003.

Playing with Aerogel, I was also reminded of some of my earliest works, when, in 1961, I used acrylic monomers to create ‘invisible reflections’. I realized I was working with a material that was as close to the immaterial as was possible for a solid. It reacted to light in much the same way as the sky.

In outer space, far beyond the planet Mars, both interstellar and cometary dust particles, travelling at 6 km a second, bombard delicate Aerogel tiles, forming conical crystalline caverns that cradle these fossils from other worlds.

Ruins are fragments of our material history, buildings, cities, all are traces of our civilisation. History is composed of memories of human experience. Video is memory encoded in light.”

Liliane Lijn

'Space-Time' List of Works

Heavenly Fragments, 2008, Aerogel Fragments of cone and disc on grey mirror in Perspex case, perlescent metallic coated square column housing dvd player, projector Video: Visions of the East, 50’ looped dvd
Way out is way in, 2009, New work incorporating text from William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch considered Burroughs' seminal work, and one o f the landmark publications in the history of American literature.

Photo: Colin Davison