50 years of Linder’s art

50 years of Linder’s art – feminism, punk and the power of plants

Katarzyna Kosmala, University of the West of Scotland

Currently on show at the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh, Linder’s retrospective Danger Came Smiling showcases half a century of trailblazing art. The exhibition delves into her fascination with plants, inviting the viewer to see beyond traditional notions of gender and sexuality.

For the Liverpool-born artist, there is enchantment in creating imaginary worlds, generating new meanings and inviting others in. Turning toward botanical themes marks a compelling evolution in Linder’s art practice. This new twist fuses a more glamorous side of her punk-feminist roots with symbolic power of the natural world.

Her fascination with plants isn’t just visual, it’s conceptual. In Danger Came Smiling she uses botanical imagery to examine how nature has historically been feminised, controlled and aestheticised, as she explores plant reproduction, horticultural histories and the cultural symbolism associated with flowers.

The Goddess Who Lives in the Mind (2020) features a gigantic lily with stamens protruding from a glamorous woman’s body, while Double Cross Hybrid (2013) reveals an enormous rose blooming out of a woman’s stomach – a monstrous “other” taken away from the domestic space, dressed in botanical themes.

A living critique of gendered power structures – the way access to power, privilege and resources is disproportionately dominated by men – the exhibition is rooted in the organic and the ephemeral, with echoes of her earlier subversive photomontages.

Linder is best known for this disruptive technique – cutting and pasting images from disparate sources to create new, often shocking visual narratives. Her work embodies the radical spirit of early 20th-century European Dada and Surrealists such as Hannah Höch, George Grosz and Dora Maar who pioneered the method, amalgamating images from popular media, magazines and photography into political and satirical statements.

Her critique of the commodification of the female body also draws inspiration from feminist artists such as Hannah Wilke, Carolee Schneemann and Martha Rosler. Here, her photomontages are like jigsaw configurations that blur the boundaries between art, ecology and mythology.

Linder’s outdoor performance A Kind of Glamour About Me was staged to great effect this summer at the opening night of the Edinburgh Art Festival. A dazzling, genre-defying spectacle, it fused Holly Blakey’s visceral choreography, Maxwell Sterling’s haunting soundscapes and Ashish Gupta’s flamboyant fashion. Showcasing an eerie synthesis of body and nature, it turned the Royal Botanic Garden into a site of transformation and storytelling. Here visitors can enjoy it as a video installation.

An improvised take on the myth of Myrrha – the Greek mythological figure who was turned into a myrrh tree after having sex with her father – three dancers in exquisite costumes appear as shifting identities, with one eventually merging into a tree for protection.

Linder draws inspiration from the mythical symbolism of plants. The word glamour in her work comes from the Scots word glamer, which means a magic spell – witches in 16th-century Scotland were hanged for casting “glamer”. Traces of Linder’s photomontage style spill over into the verdant green of the gardens – gigantic lips appear out of nowhere, like a haunting Cheshire cat’s smile.

Linder reclaims women in history and mythology as forbears and heroines. Just like her photomontages, whether in live performance or in video, they are made of parts and fragments that come together in ethereal improvisations.

Her eerie video work Bower of Bliss (2018) is inspired by the detention of Mary Queen of Scots at Chatsworth House in the late 16th century (Linder was in residence there in 2017). In the video, Mary and her custodian Bess of Hardwick are dressed in lavish, colourful costumes designed by Louise Gray. They move to a Maxwell Sterling composition that signals the pleasures and boredom of confinement through clinging, holding and posing. Here we see fabrication mixed with history, witch with knight, warden with prisoner.

Featuring themes of female empowerment and enchantment with nature, Linder’s signature tableaux vivants (living pictures), reveal performers’ dramatically made-up eyes and lips covered with herbs and flowers from the kitchen garden.

Bower of Bliss refers to an enchanted garden from Edmund Spence’s poem The Faerie Queene. The work was originally recreated for Art on the Underground as a billboard at Southwark station in 2018, featuring women who worked on London Underground and performed in the dance work created from it.

Linder’s newer digital works appear to depart from the DIY-rebellion aesthetic of the radical punk era of the 1970s and early 1980s (such as her iconic Buzzcocks’ Orgasm Addict album cover). Cut-and-paste aggression, visual noise, and an anti-polish vibe were reactions to her life story at the time, when she was fighting the feminist cause.

Newer works acknowledge the limitations of punk’s visual language and Linder’s desire to move beyond shock value toward more ritualistic, poetic and nature-infused forms of resistance. She invites us to see plants not as decorative or scientific specimens, but as symbols of survival, sensuality and subversion. These works recycle her artistic technique of combining imagery from domestic or fashion magazines with pornography and other archival material featuring petals, plants or marine life.

Her botanical turn is both a continuation of her feminist sensibility and a new way of engaging with the world, through the slow, radical language of nature. Cleansing the wounds of women represented in her works as well as her own, it leans into the language of plants as a profoundly healing experience.

It is a joy to watch this groundbreaking icon evolve her practice, transformed from an angry young rebel to an accomplished multimedia artist. At the age of 71, Linder continues to challenge societal norms while embracing the beauty and complexity of identity, cementing her legacy as a trailblazer in contemporary art.

Danger Came Smiling is on at Inverleigh House, the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh, until October 19, and then transfers to the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea, in November 2025.

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Katarzyna Kosmala, Chair in Culture Media and Visual Arts, University of the West of Scotland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

New exhibition explores history of decorative borders: from medieval manuscripts to William Morris

Sir Galahad, the Quest for the Holy Grail by Arthur Hughes (1870). Works from pre-Raphaelite artists like Hughes are on display in the exhibition. Courtesy of National Museums Liverpool

Cynthia Johnston, School of Advanced Study, University of London

The Nature of Gothic, at the Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery, explores the history of decorative borders over hundreds of years. It covers the period from the late medieval age to the Arts and Crafts Movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In the late medieval period, manuscripts that were produced in northern Europe often featured decorative borders that framed the text of both religious and secular works. These borders featured motifs from the classical world such as swirling acanthus leaves, Greek meanders and intricate patterns which interlace flowers, leaves and vines.

From the early decades of the 13th century these largely naturalistic forms, used to enhance the visual appeal of the page, began to be used more widely. They were added to the front of books and important sections within them, such as the beginnings of individual psalms or chapters of the Bible.

These naturalistic frames provided platforms tangible enough for figures, animals and grotesques to be placed upon. These characters often present an alternative reality to the verses of the psalms or Aristotle’s Libri Naturales that they decorate.

The meaning and intent of these spaces is yet to be fully understood. The battle of a miniature knight versus a fully armed snail, for example, might be interpreted as the moral fight against evil in the margins of the psalm. But the meaning of a tiny man pushing another in a wheel barrow adjacent to the beginning of Aristotle’s Libri Naturales is less clear.

The great enthusiasm for the illustrated grotesques (hybrid creatures which combine human and fantastical animal forms) in these peripheral spaces began in northern France. Texts produced by the monastic schools which emerged with the rise of scholasticism in the late 12th century often carried this type of decoration.

I have been collaborating with the Blackburn museum for over a decade, and have curated this exhibition alongside Anthea Purkis, its curator of art. This exhibition features some early examples of this technique from manuscripts held by the museum as well as examples on loan from the British Library.

In the exhibition

The Bedford Psalter and Hours. British Library Collection

Although the names of very few medieval artists whose work appeared in manuscripts are known, Blackburn Museum and the British Library both hold examples of the intricate and sophisticated work of two known illuminators.

They are Mâitre Françoise, who ran his business in Paris in the third quarter of the 15th century, and Herman Scheere – perhaps the most renowned illuminator in London in the 15th century.

From his workshop on London Bridge, Scheere produced flowing extravagant frames for the pages of his books. His book the Bedford Psalter and Hours, (loaned by the British Library and on display in the exhibition) was commissioned by the younger brother of King Henry V. This aristocratic commission demonstrates the success of Scheere’s business and the appetite for the decorated border.

Some 15th century examples from northern Europe also show the influence of Islamic art on northern European aesthetics. A 15th-century Qur'an manuscript from the John Rylands Library and Research Centre in Manchester is on display in the exhibition. muh .aqqāq script is used for Arabic primary text while the interlinear script in Persian and Eastern Turkish is in minuscule naskh script. This reflects the various communities for whom the book was intended.

The beginnings of the chapters of the Qur'an manuscript, the ṣuwwar, are surrounded by borders filled with flowing abstract forms. They’re reminiscent of, but not imitative of, the natural world. This decorative tradition would have cross pollinated with western European cultures through trade and conflict.

Examples of Persian calligraphy also demonstrate the persistence of the trend for decorative borders at this time. The Rylands’ Persian MS 10, an album completed before 1785–1786AD, features an entwined Arabic calligraphy composition formed from two slogans Tawakkaltu bi-maghfirat al-Muhaymin (I entrust myself to the forgiveness of the Guardian) in black, and Huwa al-Ghafūr Dhū-al-Raḥmah (He is the All-Forgiving Lord of Mercy) in red thuluth script. Two dark indigo blue borders bear delicate silver and gold foliage surrounding a wide margin embellished with vibrant floral flourishes.

Migration to the printed page

In 15th century Germany, Johannes Gutenberg invented the moveable-type printing press. His new technology produced a codex (an ancient manuscript text in book form) that looked like a traditional manuscript with regard to text and margins.

Rubrication – the decoration of letters in coloured inks – was added by hand to the first printed books. As the ability of printers to produce more nuanced illustrations accelerated, the decorated border survived and thrived. Indeed, its importance as part of the aesthetic in terms of how a book should look to an early modern reader drove forward innovations in technology.

The Blackburn Museum’s collection of early printed books is full of examples of the new technology of print accommodating the decorative frame.

Falling in and out of favour

The decorated frame fell out of favour in the 16th and 17th centuries. For western European readers it began to appear old fashioned. But it returned during the Industrial Revolution, thanks to the work of the Pre-Raphaelite movement.

Pre-Raphaelite artists reached back to the medieval period for their inspiration as well as artistic practice. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, Arthur Hughes and their associates set out to reject the values and industrial production of the 19th century. Medieval narratives found new audiences in Pre-Rapahelite art such as Arthur Hughes’ Sir Galahad, the Quest for the Holy Grail. In the subsequent Arts and Crafts Movement, books, ceramics, textiles and furniture were produced with minimal mechanical intervention. The medieval decorative frame thrived across various media.

Sleeping Beauty by Edward Burne Jones (circa 1885). Manchester Art Gallery

William Morris’ hand-written copy of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam provides a compelling example of the after-life of the medieval margin. On each page, the text is surrounded by a lush decorated border which is punctuated by cameos that were designed by Burne-Jones and painted by Charles Fairfax Murray.

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, written and decorated by William Morris. British Library Collection

The Nature of Gothic gives visitors the opportunity to compare the work of medieval masters of decorative art with the work produced by the Pre-Raphaelites and the Arts and Crafts Movement. Contemporary artist Jamie Holman and ceramicist Nehal Aamir also contribute modern interpretations of the decorated frame.

The result is a celebration of the verdant decorative frames which twist and turn through time, illuminating art of both the past and present.

The Nature of Gothic is at the Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery from September 13 to December 13.

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With thanks to Jake Benson for the translation of Persian 10.

Cynthia Johnston, Senior Lecturer in History of the Book, School of Advanced Study, University of London

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.