Liliane Lijn: Arise Alive 24 May – 2 November 2025

This summer, Tate St Ives presents Arise Alive, a major exhibition of the work of Liliane Lijn. Surveying Lijn’s career over five decades, this expansive survey features key works by an artist whose wide-ranging practice includes sculpture, installation, painting, drawing, collage, video and performance. Lijn – one of the first women artists to create kinetic works – explores the intersection of art, poetry and science, combining surrealism, mythology, philosophy, scientific innovation and feminism. Organised by Haus der Kunst in Munich and mumok in Vienna, in collaboration with Tate St Ives, Arise Alive is the most comprehensive survey of the artist’s work to date.

The exhibition explores three key themes that span Lijn’s career: kinetic art – initially through motorisation and optical effects; light and energy – giving visible form to immaterial and invisible forces; and feminism and the body – challenging dominant ideas of the feminine in art and technology.

Lijn encountered surrealism while in Paris in the late 1950s, where the movement’s focus on the unconscious influenced her emerging practice. The exhibition begins with early works on paper such as Sky Scrolls (1959-61), in which Lijn combines her interest in Chinese horizontal scroll paintings and her love of the pure vastness of the sky to produce cloud worlds inhabited by fantastical flying creatures.

In Athens, in the 1960s, Lijn began her investigations into the effects of light and the transfer of energy. Works such as Fire Lines (1960), made with molten plastic, sparked a period of experimentation with polymers and other synthetic materials. In Drillings and Cuttings, Lijn uses the transparency of Perspex blocks to reverse space, whereas Echolights (1963) and Cosmic Flares (1965-6) are explorations of the connections between cosmic optics and those possible in a work of art, as well as creating a visual metaphor for the particle wave paradox. These led to the creation of a seminal work, Liquid Reflections (1966–8); in which a hollow acrylic disc filled with water rotates on a platform, using spin and gravity to create a luminous dance of two translucent spheres across its surface.

Lijn’s Poem Machines of the 1960s –  rotating drums covered with Letraset poems and symbols – were her manifesto ‘to see sound’, returning words into energy vibrations. Her Poemcon, Arise Alive (1965), based on a poem by Leonard D. Marshall, uses a spinning cone to interrupt the linearity of the text, allowing the viewer to see words more freely. These works led to the larger sculptures she named Koans; punning on the cone form and the paradoxical Zen buddhist riddles used by monks  to meditate. Their form derives from the conical mound of ash, symbol of the White Goddess. This exhibition includes examples of these iconic works from as late as 2008.

In the 1960s, Lijn discovered optical glass prisms in a Paris flea market. Experiments with refraction and prisms led to a large body of work related to transformation. Exhibited for the first time in Cornwall, Lijn’s Prism Stones (1978) combine round stones she sourced from along the Cornish coastline with prisms in an attempt to merge nature and human technology.

Settling in London in 1966, she began to work on Crossing Map (1983), recounting the spiritual journey of an artist who, using the energy of memory, travels in time and transcends her material body. Lijn’s search for a new female iconography culminates in her series Cosmic Dramas, two of which will be presented in this exhibition. Conjunction of Opposites: Lady of the Wild Things (1983), a winged lunar archetype, referencing ancient godesses who protected nature responds to the artist's voice, translating its vibrations into light. Woman of War (1986) is a futuristic female archetype, born from a song, whose words issue a cryptic warning for humanity. First shown at the Venice Biennale in 1986, these works interact with one another, introducing a new powerful female spirit. Lijn's more sombre and brooding masterpice, Electric Bride (1989) is based on the ancient Sumerian epic of the descent of the goddess Inanna to darkness and return to light.

Lijn’s life-long quest to find a path to female spiritual power, explore the flow of energy and the essence of life has created a body of work to date that is formally varied and fundamentally rooted in urgent questioning of light and energy, the material and immaterial.

Also on view at this time at Tate St Ives is Emma Critchley’s new UK exhibition, Soundings, featuring a three-screen film and sound installation with live dance performance; an expansive portrait of the deep sea as seen through multiple lenses that many will never experience first-hand. Part of an ongoing investigative project, Soundings takes audiences on a journey to the deep through film, sound and dance, bringing to light the issue of deep sea mining. Tate St Ives is one of three UK venues to present Soundings in 2025, including John Hansard Gallery, Southampton and Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts, as Brighton Festival — a series of exhibitions in a pivotal year where the International Seabed Authority aims to finalise regulations for deep-sea mining in international waters.