The British photomontage artist with hex appeal raises ghosts in the Cambridge gallery and modernist house for her first UK retrospective
There is an instantly calming quality to Linder, as though her very presence is a balm to the swirling disarray around her. And it’s all too fitting that the first UK retrospective of her work has been named ‘Linderism’. The artist has quietly and stealthily commandeered Kettle’s Yard in a multi-sensory takeover, from the galleries to the House, Research Space, front-of-house staff uniforms, stairwell, café menu, and the neighbouring St Peter’s Church.
‘I was the lucky one, I didn’t overdose on drugs, I didn’t cut myself, I didn’t do my flesh. I had somewhere to take all my free-floating anxiety, the not-knowingness. I could make my mark with it’ It’s not just the ghostly presences of the Edes that Linder gravitates to. In the church adjacent to Kettle’s Yard, she calls up another spirit – this one deeply personal to her – with. Originally commissioned by curator Michael Stanley for an exhibition in an abandoned school in Widnes in 1997, this new iteration of the installation follows on from the 2019 staging of the work at Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery, for Stanley’s memorial exhibition.