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.