Liliane Lijn
Liliane Lijn’s work since the early 1960’s has crossed boundaries between disciplines and embraced an eclectic range of media. Producing sculpture, books and film, she uses bronze, steel, aluminium, glass, mica, perspex, neon, water, fire and digital media such as video and the internet. In all her work the unifying thread is her interest in the relationship between the material and the immaterial: body /mind, matter/energy, darkness/light.
Conical forms have been part of Lijn’s work since the sixties when she was inspired by the striped cones which act as signals on the roads which crisscross our planet. The cone, as symbol of the ‘sacred mountain’, has been the basic architectural form for places of worship throughout Asia and the Indian subcontinent. Lijn converted cone to ‘Koan, deliberately using the word for Zen Buddhist riddles, which focus the mind on paradox, to point out the paradox at the core of her own works. She says that cones may also signify “the dream of escaping gravity and the biological necessity of living within its embrace”. They have formed the core of her kinetic works, dissolving text into lines, light and colour.
With Liquid Koan Liliane Lijn has used translucent polyester resin to propose a paradox: layers of colour appear distinct and separate, or merge one into another, depending on the angle at which they are seen. The cone is seen as both solid and fluid within the medium of light.
