Thirty years ago, a simple mistake brought together two important feminist artists living on opposite sides of the globe: Vivian Lynn (b. 1931, Wellington, d. 2018, Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand) and London-based Liliane Lijn, (b. 1939 New York, USA). The story begins in 1991, when Lynn was visiting New York and set up a studio visit with the eminent feminist art historian Lucy Lippard. When they met, Lippard disclosed she had originally confused Lynn with Lijn simply due to the similarities in their names (particularly striking when said out aloud, as Lijn is pronounced with a silent ‘j’). Intrigued to know more, Lynn looked up Lijn’s work and was struck by the affinities in their artistic concerns and visual languages. She arranged a two-person exhibition with Lijn at Brian Queenin Gallery in Wellington in 1998. Then, in 2021, after Lynn’s death, she exhibited alongside Lijn again in adjacent spaces of the 13th Gwangju Biennale, Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning which ran from 1 April—9 May 2021. As the exhibition’s co-artistic director Natasha Ginwala explained to me: “We had not known about this wonderful story but placed them on the same floor because we felt both artists have kindled seminal feminist approaches, sharing a haptic and kinetic aesthetic while reflecting on aspects of femme power and divinity which we wished to highlight.”^[01] 01. Natasha Ginwala, email to the author, 20 July 2021. Concurrently in London, a solo exhibition of Lynn’s work, Mind Fields, was held at the gallery Southard Reid from 14 April—26 June 2021, which Lijn was instrumental in instigating. This text takes as anchor points these three exhibitions to trace the transcontinental history of the relationship between Lynn and Lijn as well as the curious similarities between their art and ideas.

Vivian Lynn is considered one of the first New Zealand artists to explore issues related to feminism in her work, which spanned a diverse array of formats such as installation, sculpture, prints, books and drawings. Rarely shown outside New Zealand, but exhibited widely nationally, she was actively involved in the women's art movement in New Zealand including co-convening the first national seminar for women artists and arts professionals in 1982.^[02] 02. The seminar was co-convened with artist Barbara Strathdee as part of the FI New Zealand sculpture project held from 8 November – 2 December 1982, a temporary event organised by Ian Hunter in Wellington that included site-specific works by New Zealand and Australian artists, including Lynn.  The female body was a constant site of investigation for Lynn, who delighted in delving into its abject qualities as well as the psychological space of the unconscious. She said: “Our bodies are mediated by cultural codes, as are our daily lives. My interest is in dislocating and transgressing these codes in a way that makes them tangible.”^[03] 03. Vivian Lynn quoted in “Bookworks: Liliane Lijn and Vivian Lynn”, exhibition catalogue, Brian Queenin Gallery, Wellington, 1998, p. 5. For example, Caryatid (1986), displayed at the 13th Gwangju Biennale, consists of a freestanding column covered in synthetic human hair inspired by the caryatids at Hadrian's Villa in Rome. It was exhibited next to a slightly later work, Spin: Versor Versari (1995–97), a series of nine blown-up MRI scans of the artist’s brain, each named as the spaces of a Roman house. The selection demonstrates not only Lynn’s resolve to question the Cartesian mind/body split but also her interest in ancient civilisations.

This dual concern is shared by Liliane Lijn, who was also active in the women’s movement, across the globe in London. Since settling there in 1966, Lijn quickly became a leading figure in the male-dominated field of kinetic sculpture and concrete poetry in Britain. After protesting at the lack of exhibition opportunities for women artists, in 1978 she co-curated what came to be known as the “women’s” edition of the Hayward Annual, featuring a higher proportion of female to male artists.^[04] 04. The 1978 Hayward Annual was selected by an all-female selection committee including Liliane Lijn, Rita Donagh, Tessa Jaray, Kim Lim and Gillian Wise. It featured 23 artists, of which 16 were women and seven were men. The show is considered a feminist response to the 1975 Hayward Gallery exhibition The Condition of Sculpture, which featured only four women artists compared with 36 male artists. The 1978 Hayward Annual catalogue essay is written by Lucy Lippard. Over the last six decades her indefatigable practice has grown to encompass a similarly broad range of media to Lynn’s, with notable overlaps, including performance, poetry, books, prints and drawings. Although the female body was always present in Lijn’s early work, such as her invoking of the Greek goddess of the hearth Hestia in the ongoing form of iconic white rotating ‘koan’ sculptures she began in the late 1960s, there was a marked shift in Lijn’s work in the 1980s towards a more deliberate image of the feminine. She said: “It was around 1980 when I realised that (feminist mythology) was what really interested me … I wanted to find a new way of looking at the feminine and to bring into that everything: plants, animals, humans and machines”.^[05] 05. Liliane Lijn, in conversation with Anna McNay, “Liliane Lijn: interview”, Studio International, 2014, www.studiointernational.com/index.php/liliane-lijn-interview At the 13th Gwangju Biennale, Lijn showed Electric Bride (1989), a larger-than-life mystical female figure connected by wires to her metal enclosure, from which a 100-volt electric current circulated. A recent work displayed nearby, Gravity’s Dance (2019), encompasses a large spinning black skirt edged with LED lights that levitates by rotating at a precise speed, evidencing Lijn’s ongoing use of industrial materials and movement to relate the female form to the cosmic.

The parallel display of Lijn and Lynn in Gwangju echoes the two-person exhibition held over twenty years ago at Brian Queenin Gallery. According to the exhibition catalogue: “The impetus for this exhibition came through a chance meeting with Liliane in London in 1995 by Wendy Harding.” This meeting occurred at The Artists’ Book Fair at the Royal Festival Hall, where Lijn had a stand: she showed a dummy copy of her new book, Her Mother’s Voice (1996-98) as well as several of her rotating text sculptures ‘Poemcons’, the two editions of Crossing Map (1983), described below, and some xeroxed copies of Unfinitude, the French edition curated by Angeline Neveu and published by Editions de La Nepe, which featured Lijn’s book of poems Six Throws of The Oracular Keys (1981).^[06] 06. Lilaine Lijn, email to the author, 18 August 2021. Like Lippard, Harding was struck by the similarity in the artist’s names and, later, by similarities in the artist’s work. As Lijn explains:

“Wendy told me that she was on a mission to meet me. A close friend of hers, the artist Vivian Lynn, had asked her to try to meet me, when in London. It was simply an amazing coincidence that coming to the Book Fair, my stand was the first she had seen. She explained that Vivian had followed my work for years, because of the curious similarity of our names, but she felt that there was more of a connection between us … I had never heard of Vivian Lynn but I was curious to find out more.”^[07] 07. Ibid.

Harding visited Lijn in her studio, where she had installed her impressive large kinetic sculptures Woman of War (1986) and Lady of the Wild Things (1983). Harding asked if she would agree to hold an exhibition in Wellington, and thereafter arranged a solo exhibition of Lijn’s work at the National Library Gallery in 1996,  which toured to the Govett-Brewster Gallery in New Plymouth. Lijn flew to Wellington for the show and finally met Lynn in person. Lijn recounts:

“As we completed the setting up of my works at the Library, Vivian appeared. Vivian was eight years older than me, carefully dressed, her shoulder length hair in a bob over her forehead. We started talking, as if we had known each other for any number of years. Looking at each of my works very attentively, she asked me questions about why I had put words on drums and made them spin, what Crossing Map was about and how the text related to the drawings. She had ordered a copy from a local bookshop. Looking through Her Mother’s Voice brought up her own history and then returning to materials, we spoke about Japanese paper and the way I had printed the text. I explained that I wanted to use an everyday machine to print on delicate paper, in the same way that life had left its marks on the fine woman, who happened to be my mother.

On hearing that I had made large figures using mica, she told me about her book, how she had found mica paper during her travels and had used it as a cover for Thresholds. We realised that we were both deeply interested in myths and memory and the confrontation of life with death. She invited me to her home, where I met Jurgen, her German sculptor husband, very supportive of Vivian as she appeared to be of him. The pathway leading to their front door was a serpentine pattern of stones designed by Vivian. I felt very comfortable with her ability to stretch beyond the domains of drawing and painting, which seemed to be her initial concerns, if not her main ones. She almost emptied the contents of her plan chest to show me varied works on paper. She explained how important the grid was for her, symbolic of structure and order, the container for all the potential wildness of her spirit and for the much more organic forms that she also pursued. I related to that, since I had used the discipline of science and the materials of technology to contain my own unconscious dragons. We had in common, I think, the need to use our minds to withhold the outpourings of our body. What I am saying is that her use of grids held in check the more organic forms in her work. The machine, in my work, however subtle it became over the years, controlled the violence of the body.”^[08] 08. Ibid.

The joint exhibition at Brian Quentin Gallery, Bookworks: Liliane Lijn and Vivian Lynn, presented artist book projects by both artists, and the catalogue’s graphic design played with the similarities between the artist’s names. Lijn relates: “On the front of the leaflet about the exhibition, our two names were repeated in a graphic column, the letters, so similar to begin with, interchanging and interfering. I found that column disturbing, as if, by looking at it, I might lose my identity.”^[09] 09. Ibid.

Lijn exhibited Crossing Map (1983), a prose poem which is presented in sixteen sections, with fifteen Songs and one final Postlude. Loosely based on the artist's own biography, the text traces the spiritual journey of a woman artist as she finds her voice, builds confidence and learns to balance the outputs and inputs of energy in order to look through matter. The text is presented alongside repeated patterns of cellular imagery that, as noted by the art historian David Mellor, suggest “physiologies of visual perception” such as “nerves and blood vessels”, and which the artist considers a 'visual score' rather than illustrations.^[10] 10. David Alan Mellor, Liliane Lijn: Works 1959-1980, exhibition catalogue, Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry, 2005. p. 100. In recent years Lijn has performed Crossing Map live for a number of occasions, including in 2019 as part of a solo show that I curated at Tate Britain (a fact the editor of Contemporary HUM didn’t know when they commissioned this here text, which is yet another coincidence!).^[11] 11. Tate Britain, Spotlight: Liliane Lijn, 12 November 2018–28 April 2019. Lynn contributed two works to Bookworks. The first was Angels: Chimeric Antibodies (1997) a boxed set of nine digital prints of the artist’s brain, continuing ideas and techniques used in her large three-dimensional installation mentioned above, Spin: Verso Versari (1997). The second work was titled Threshold (1983/1996), a large book consisting of ten pages of crumpled tracing paper processed to resemble human skin, mediated on physical identificatory markers of the individual self, such as wrinkles and scars. Its cover, as described by Lijn above, was made from mica paper, a silicate commonly used as an electrical insulator and often used by Lijn in her sculptures. 

The latest encounter between the two artists’ work occurred posthumously, three years after Lynn’s death in 2018. The name Vivian Lynn came up in conversation between Liliane Lijn and a friend of hers who lived nearby in North London, the New-Zealand born gallerist Phillida Reid (of Southard Reid). Reid became fascinated with Lynn’s work and commenced a relationship with Lynn’s estate that resulted in the first solo show of Lynn’s work in London: Vivian Lynn: Mind Fields, 2021. Beautifully curated, with artworks positioned within the space so the gallery architecture seemed to echo their forms, the exhibition included four large drawings from 1984 and a selection of works from the Mind fields series: two-dimensional collages using Rorschach ink blots made in 2007 but whose forms originate in a body of work begun in 1988. Similar to Threshold, the Mind fields use layers of thin paper wrinkled to resemble human skin, however, in this instance these are made from Gampi paper soaked in pigmented glue laid on top of aluminium, and feature grid-like pencil marks and painted Rorschach test shapes. When interviewed about these works, Lynn wrote: 

“These works are not about something, they are arrived at from my ground of experience which has long eschewed the notion of a stable, enduring inner self-and identity—the unified individual—in favour of a corporeal, visceral, neural, erotic mind self in the world, where identity emerges, ebbs, flows and mutates from behaviour in the lived space we inhabit.”^[12] 12. Vivian Lynn interviewed by Peter Vangioni, Art School 125, October 2007: www.christchurchartgallery.org.nz/artschool125/Interviews/V_Lynn/index.html, [accessed 1/7/2021]

It is striking that Lynn, like Lijn, has recently been picked up by a London commercial gallery interested in showing work of the 1980s.^[13] 13. Liliane Lijn’s first show with her current dealer Rodeo in 2018, Lady of the Wild Things, included a selection of works made between 1979 and 1990. The exhibition introduction text read: 
“Despite the earlier formal works that Lijn has gained reputation for, it is a more lyrical, elegiac and powerful body of work that we thought very significant as well as timely for the first show at Rodeo… this show informs itself from Liliane’s different aspects of female power.” www.rodeo-gallery.com/exhibitions/liliane-lijn/ [accessed 4/7/2021] This attention indicates not only the contemporary resurgence of interest in themes of feminist mythology and the body but also more generally in art of this ‘critical decade’.^[14] 14. The title of a hugely important edition of Ten.8 edited by Stuart Hall and David A. Bailey; “Critical Decade: Black British Photography in the 80s,” Ten 8, vol. 2, no. 3, 1992. For recent shows revisiting this period see, for example, Place Is Here: The Work of Black Artists in 1980s Britain, a show held at several venues including Van Abbemuseum, Nottingham Contemporary, South London Gallery and MIMA between 2016-2019. It is also decades overdue (and in Lynn’s case, posthumous) as is sadly all too-common with senior women artists of their generation. Yet, as their recent shows prove, the groundbreaking practices of Lynn and Lijn continue to be as urgent as when they first emerged, and continue to remain in dialogue with one another. As Lijn shared with me: 

“I was so pleased to see that Vivian was having an exhibition in London at Southard Reid. Her work, at once experimental in its unusual treatment of materials, was grounded in her deep investigations of both areas of science and mythological histories. In this, our practices like our names converse with one another. That recognition of her work seems to have come largely when she is no longer around to smile, is the story of so many women artists of her and my generation.”^[15] 15. Liliane Lijn, email to author, 18 August 2021.

The author would like to thank Liliane Lijn for her generous contribution to this text.

A companion read to this essay is published on ArtNow in the context of a collaboration with HUM that sees our two editorial platforms publish a pair of related essays concurrently. In her essay Mother Lode, On the Phenomenon of the 'Older Woman Artist', Christina Barton reflects on the belated attention being paid to senior women artists.