Linder Sterling has been cutting up the rulebook for 50 years. The pioneering feminist artist interrupts dominant narratives and forges new paths for women, and has been doing so from 1970s post-punk Manchester to the now-abstracted landscape of the digital age. Linder continually dissects what we have grown to accept, rearranging history through photomontage and performance.
This summer, she brings two-part performance piece A kind of glamour about me to Mount Stuart, ahead of her first retrospective in Scotland which launches at the Edinburgh Art Festival in August. We spoke about her own presence in her work, how that coalesces with the space around her, and how both can be used to reimagine new mythologies for the world.
Let’s talk about magazine aesthetics. Though we can critique the form’s history for creating damaging expectations around female body image, is there room for a reclamation, and hope for the medium?
Linder: Of course there’s room for reclamation – it’s what I’ve been doing since the late 70s. The glossy page has always been a battleground. Yes, it has perpetuated a narrow, violent ideal of femininity, but that’s exactly why I’ve sliced into it. Photomontage lets you interrupt the page, reconfigure its power, and insert new subjectivities.
When I first started working with images from Penthouse and Good Housekeeping, I wasn’t interested in making polite interventions. I wanted to distort, to rupture. And in that rupture, there’s hope: a chance to re-see the female body on her own terms.
You feature in a lot of the work. Where is the line between model/subject and artist?
That line is deliberately blurred. In many of my performances and collaborations, including those with Northern Ballet or my operatic works, I’m both instigator and image.
It’s not about ego – it’s about occupying a space historically denied to women: agency over representation. When I appear in my own work, I’m not playing a role; I’m asserting presence. The body becomes a tool, a medium, not a muse. To be the artist and the image collapses the hierarchy. I don’t want to be looked at – I want to be seen.
How do your different mediums speak to each other? How does photomontage connect or come through in performance, and vice versa?
Photomontage is about dissonance and revelation. It’s the same in performance. You take two or more elements that don’t belong together and force a relationship – they clash, they converse, they coalesce. Whether I’m layering a woman’s torso with a meat grinder in collage, or placing a human voice inside a rose-covered hilltop, it’s about hybrid forms, about potential. Each medium informs the other. The jaggedness of photomontage finds rhythm in choreography. The still image breathes in performance. Both are about transformation.
You juxtapose images of porn with the medium of collage which, if you think of it as something like scrapbooking, is a ‘feminine’ medium that has connotations of the home and domesticity. Is this a rebellion in itself? Is it something else?
Yes, it’s rebellion, but it’s also reclamation. Collage – particularly photomontage – was historically political, and when reimagined through a domestic lens, it becomes doubly subversive. Scrapbooking, as you say, is intimate, often trivialised. So when you use that aesthetic language to confront misogyny, to deconstruct pornography, you create a space of psychic resistance. You’re turning the tools of oppression into weapons of critique. There’s poetry in that. The kitchen table becomes a site of revolt.
Your work often looks at the present and, even more so, towards the future. Where are you looking now? What do you see?
I’m looking toward the thresholds – between nature and culture, body and spirit, past and future. We’re in a moment of collapse and emergence. Climate, identity, technology – they’re all converging. I’m interested in how we can reimagine ritual, particularly feminine or queer ritual, in this context. What might devotion look like now? What might care look like? I’m always seeking ways to forge new mythologies – ones that serve, rather than suppress.
These performances will take place in beautiful natural settings, bringing nature into the conversation in a way that isn’t quite possible inside a ‘white cube’ gallery space. How does nature influence your aims and output here?
Nature is not a backdrop – it’s a collaborator. The gallery sanitises; nature disrupts. When I perform outdoors – on moors, in gardens, on coastline – I’m in dialogue with ancient energies. There’s a lineage of ritual, of pilgrimage, of feminist land art that I’m building on. Nature introduces an element of the sacred. It undoes the capitalist insistence on product and perfection. Weather, insects, uneven ground – all of it forces vulnerability, presence. That’s what I’m after: the porous moment where the body meets the earth, and something unnameable passes between them.
A kind of glamour about me opens with a performance at Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute, on 14th June, alongside an exhibition that runs until 31 August. More info here.
Linder: Danger Came Smiling, a retrospective, will run from 23rd May till 19th October at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. More info here.
All photos by Charlotte Cullen, courtesy of the artist and EAF.
