In conversation with Liliane Lijn at EA Festival

I’m greatly looking forward to interviewing the artist Liliane Lijn at The Minories, Colchester, on Tuesday 30 September, for EA Festival.

Here’s the info from the festival site:

Join us for an evening with trail-blazing contemporary artist, Liliane Lijn, whose seminal kinetic artworks redefined the possibilities of creative and artistic expression. From her motorised Poem Machines of the early 1960s that infused language with additional meaning through movement, to her iconic spinning Koans and mesmerising masterwork, Liquid Reflections, Lijn merged industrial materials, movement, myth, and poetry in ways that were decades ahead of their time. Currently the subject of a major retrospective at Tate St Ives—Liliane Lijn: Arise Alive—Lijn will be at The Minories to discuss her acclaimed new memoir, Liquid Reflections, with author Tony White. Based on her diaries from 1958 to 1966, the book charts her formative years in bohemian Paris and Athens, her fearless experiments with new materials, and her navigation of love, motherhood, and an art world deeply resistant to women. Critics have hailed it as “utterly gripping, enraging, entertaining—and important” (Jennifer Higgie) and a portrait of “a unique and self-renewing force of creativity for six decades” (Marina Warner).

BUY TICKETS FOR LILIANE LIJN IN CONVERSATION WITH TONY WHITE AT EA FESTIVAL HERE…

I first met Liliane when I worked at the national office of Arts Council England in the mid-00s, and in 2006 I published a short non-fiction piece by Liliane (for the Arts Council) that had resulted from her residency at the NASA Space Science Labs at UC Berkeley entitled ‘The Language of Invisible Worlds’, which you can read more about here… (and download directly here).

Then in 2010 I published Atomanotes, an artist’s book by Liliane, on Piece of Paper Press. Since then we have shared events variously at the Horse Hospital and October Gallery, London.

I last interviewed Liliane Lijn in 2018 for 3am Magazine, on the subject of some tantalising early works she made in Paris in the late 1950s, so I am really looking forward to meeting again in Colchester on 30 September to discuss her superb new memoir Liquid Reflections (Hamish Hamilton, 2018), which is highly recommended.

Come and join us!