The promotional blurb was clear: “For the first time ever, stardust, the dust and particles of decayed and burnt-out stars, captured from beyond the moon, will be exhibited to the public.” The London art gallery Riflemaker brings you “one of the world’s first cosmic artists!”

So hotfoot, I arrived at the North London studio of Liliane Lijn, a livewire of a woman who, despite having spent four decades on London’s art scene, still retains the American accent of her birthplace. She ushers me into her spacious quarters, past all kinds of futuristic-kinetic sculptures for which she has made her name, and, finally, we come to some Perspex cases under which sit tiny sculptures made of what looks like frozen cloud.

It’s aerogel, the solid state gel that is currently one of the favourite playthings of Nasa scientists. Strong enough to insulate and protect delicate machinery, resistant to high temperatures, and yet so ethereal that you can barely discern its edges. This is what scientists recently strapped to a spacecraft in the hopes of collecting particles of space-dust.

Lijn hands me some to touch and it creaks and crumbles under my fingers like polystyrene. It’s beautifully unnatural, and the sculptures she has made from it are like diagrams of ruins. Some comprise arrangements of cones, some contain broken rings, and some contain mixtures of substances including mica, gold leaf, prisms and yellowish rosin.

But hang on. “Where’s the cool stuff?” I asked, “Where’s the dust?”

“Well, no, I’m not actually using cometary dust,” she admits. “I’m using the substance which is used to collect it. And interstellar dust – that’s stardust – hardly any of that has ever been brought back to Earth. But that’s not to say that it doesn’t exist here. How would you know that there isn’t stardust here? There might be!”

It’s not every day I’m conned by a cosmic flea circus, but Lijn’s enthusiasm for her latest project – which goes on show at Riflemaker later this month, along with examples of her earlier work – is infectious enough for fibs to be forgivable. The show results from a residency she undertook at the Nasa-funded Stardust mission in Berkeley, California in 2005.

“They launched a spacecraft far out beyond Mars,” she says, “and it was open to collect interstellar dust for months.”

The solar winds that the spacecraft encountered were bringing in dust containing ancient specks that are likely to contain material left over from the birth of the Universe. As Lijn says, very little was collected, but scientists had more luck gathering material from Comet Wild 2, which the Stardust craft met in January 2004.

“It flew quite close to the comet,” Lijn says, “and these particles were coming at it at three times the speed of a rifle bullet. If they had been more than a couple of millimetres big, they would have destroyed the spacecraft.”

Lijn is committed to advancing art with new materials. She has now started work on a scheme to use prisms to refract sunlight to illuminate the contours of the Hollywood Hills in California. She hopes it might be installed next year.

Talking about her work might lead one to think that science moulded her outlook; in fact, it was archaeology. “I suppose that’s why I have a fascination with seeing our civilisation as it dissolves,” she says. “There’s a continual process of rebirth and death. Things are constantly dissolving and coming to life once again.”

Liliane Lijn: Stardust, Riflemaker, Beak Street, London W1 (www.riflemaker.org 020-7439 0000), Apr 15-Jun 14 2008

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