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Linder – Danger Came Smiling

5 stars

 Linder’s artistic roots in Manchester’s punk scene have rightly been lionised along with her taboo busting photomontages from that era. As vital and totemic as her early feminist subversions of pornography and women’s magazines remain, this Edinburgh iteration of her fifty year retrospective first presented at the Hayward Gallery in London makes clear that there has been a lot more going on since.

 

Outside, Linder gets back to nature with cut out shapes peeking from the trees, or else  standing proud in the pond. Inside, each section playfully defines Linder’s cut and paste aesthetic. This is as much the case with the elaborately patterned rug inspired by surrealist artist Ithel Colquhoun made for 2015 dance work Children of the Mantic Stain as it as it is for her 1977 photographs of Manchester drag artists.

 

More recent works such as The Liverpool Sphinx (2025) and The Pool of Life (2021) are mature examples of Linder’s oeuvre, supreme in confidence and execution. Elsewhere, flowers bring colour to monochrome classical works.  

 

Linder’s era defining image of a naked woman with an iron for a head that appeared on the cover of Buzzcocks’ ‘Orgasm Addict’ single has to be here. As too do the DIY gig posters, the Secret Public zine created with writer Jon Savage, and album art for post punk fabulists Magazine and Linder’s own band, Ludus.

 

As a whole, Danger Came Smiling might be viewed as one giant collage that gives new definition to the idea of a body of work.

 

Edinburgh Art Festival @ Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh until October 19.


The List, August 2025

 

ends

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