Across more than five decades, artist Linder Sterling has forged one of contemporary art’s most singular visual languages, using collage, performance, and photomontage to dissect the politics of gender, power, sexuality, and representation with razor-sharp wit and subversive elegance. Emerging from the punk and post-punk ferment of 1970s Britain, Sterling transformed the everyday detritus of magazines, fashion imagery, and domestic iconography into surreal, confrontational works that feel at once seductive, unsettling, and prophetic.
In this conversation with writer and curator Jessica Hundley, The Unibrow Issue 02 cover artist Sterling reflects on collage as an act of both violence and healing, the ritual dimensions of her studio practice, the enduring symbolism of the witch and the female body in her work, and the strange alchemy through which images, music, and chance converge in her creative process. It is also a unique moment for Sterling: her first solo show in Japan, LINDER: GODDESS OF THE MIND presented by CHANEL Nexus Hall at the Kyoto Museum of Culture Annex, opens this week. What emerges in this talk is a portrait of an artist whose practice remains as radical, mischievous, and deeply resonant today as when she first began cutting into the image itself.
Jessica Hundley: You’ve often described collage as an act of violence and liberation at once. What did cutting and recombining images make possible that other forms couldn’t?
Linder Sterling: I’ve always loved the found image. Growing up in the 1950s meant that there was very little distraction away from the printed page. Books and comics were my escape route from the mundanities of everyday life in Liverpool. I made endless scrapbooks then and I dearly wish that my parents had kept at least one of them for their daughter to marvel at in later life!
The thrill of working with scissors and glue, rather than with paints and canvas, means that my pallet is to be found amidst the everyday. Give me a copy of the Sunday Times or a tabloid newspaper and the creative act immediately begins. As the art historian Dawn Ades says, the found photographs then tell in a new way. I work with a surgeons scalpel for accuracy. I like a clean cut.
A cut can be healing or violent, it depends upon who’s making the incision. Oil paints and canvas can seem so plodding in comparison to the speed of photomontage, our response to world events can be so immediate.
JH: When you began working with photomontage it was still treated as a minor or marginal practice. Did that marginality feel like a constraint, or a form of freedom?
LS: In 1976, Dawn Ades published her book, Photomontage. Her timing could not have been more perfect. Dawn's book became a creative roadmap of sorts, steadily steering me onwards over the decades. I was thrilled when Dawn included me in her updated version of the book in 2021.
Punk elevated the act of cutting. We cut up magazines, our clothes, our hair, our ties to the past. For those who struggled psychologically under Thatcher’s regime, cutting up forearms out of despair and anger became a balm of sorts. I was one of the lucky ones, the cut kept me sane and the cosmic glue held me and my ideas together.
JH: Collage requires cutting, repetition, patience, and intuition, all things associated with ritual. Does your studio practice have a ritual dimension?
LS: Working with the blade demands a ritual, a pause, and a prayer. I love to work with all the senses firing so I select soundtracks and perfumes before I begin the day. Once the ear and the olfactory nerve are happy, then the eye and the ear take care of themselves as I work.
Last year I created a bespoke incense for the Edinburgh Art Festival. Due to advances in science, the incense included my olfactory DNA. The ritual of scenting the studio now has a new dimension, the perfumed self whispers to the everyday self as I work.
JH: Is there a moment in the making where the work seems to take control?
LS: Yes, if I’m lucky. The works sometimes make themselves and there’s no rhyme or reason as to why they do. I always repeat the same rituals, use the same blades and glue, but sometimes something in the ether creates extraordinary chance happenings. I open a book at random and the face of a ballerina from 1928 stares back at me, it’s love at fist sight. For an hour or so, I let go of all expectations and received ideas of how a ballerina should be seen, I invite chance into the studio then to create the final transformation. My only role then is to carefully glue everything in place, rather like the Victorians pinning butterflies in glass cases.
JH: You’ve often resisted being placed neatly in a lineage, yet your work clearly speaks to a history of women using fragmentation and subversion as tools. Which artists did you feel permission from when you were starting out and which did you discover later?
LS: When I was a teenager, I used to spend hours copying Aubrey Beardsley drawings. It meant that I developed dexterity with fine nibs and Indian ink at quite a young age. I didn’t expect this to be a transferable skill but later, in 1976, when I exchanged the nib for the scalpel, ink for glue, I could work swiftly and assuredly as I aligned myself within the tradition of photomontage.
The ghosts of Hannah Hoch, Toyen, John Heartfield and Kurt Schwitters showed me the way forward. I think that it’s very timely to remind ourselves that photomontage and Dada emerged during the First World War, only scissors, glue and paper could capture the horrors of war and the fragility of the human body.
During lockdown I worked with David O’Russell to create photomontages and assemblages for Margot Robbie’s character for David’s Amsterdam film set in 1918. It meant that I had to loop back to those times and revise early Dada amidst solitary confinement in real time.
JH: Your work insists on the female body as a site of contradiction pleasure, objectification, rage, humor, violence. How has your relationship to that image changed over time?
LS: I don’t think that my relationship to the female body has changed despite the depiction of the female body now becoming extremely surreal at times. The surgical knife is used for cosmetic surgery as never before. So many faces and bodies are newly engineered with fillers and cuts and tucks. The female body can become gothic in these times so there’s a new level of fascination afoot.
In parallel, war rages globally far more than it ever has in my lifetime. I sometimes wonder if it’s easier for some men and women to obsess about ageing rather than to face (pardon the pun) the world beyond the looking glass?
JH: The witch is a recurring presence in the history that surrounds your work, as a woman who refuses containment, who uses knowledge, who is punished for it. Did you ever think of yourself as working in that lineage?
LS: My studio is close to a castle in which famous witch trails took place in 1612. Women were found guilty of witchcraft and then hung in the moors beyond the town. This daily reminder of misogyny in its most acute mode keeps the emblem of the witch very much in my thoughts.
I was always curious about witches, and the unseen and the unspoken. When I was fourteen, my mother bought me a Ouija board for my birthday. I spent hours holding seances with my girlfriends, our adolescent hormones delighting in each dial-in to a parallel universe.
JH: Your images feel like talismans, dangerous, funny, obscene, protective. Do you think about your collages as objects with agency?
LS: Very much so, perhaps in the tradition of poppets, to use a phrase from the witch trials. Poppets were a form of sympathetic magic transmitted through wood pulp and glue in the shape of a doll. I also transmit through wood, pulp and glue every time I cut up a magazine or book.
I know that those who live with my photomontages often use them for contemplation. Meanings shift over time, none of the works have fixed meanings so that a sixteen year old might find agency in my work in a very different way to a forty year old.
JH: You’ve said that sex in your work is never just sex, it’s always about power. Has that power dynamic shifted in the decades since you first began working?
LS: The power dynamic has shifted simultaneously forwards and backwards. Two years ago I interviewed Mia Khalifa, my admiration for her knows no bounds for her fearlessness in speaking out about the sex industry. I asked Mia if ethical pornography can become a reality? Mia answered with a definite yes but then explained that all of the existing distribution channels, including Pornhub, have tube sites promoting under age sex, in turn contributing to child trafficking. The power dynamic is now more convoluted and ever shifting than ever.
JH: With Ludus, you used your own body as both image and instrument. How did performance complicate or extend your collage practice?
LS: Performance acts very much as an antidote to the relatively small muscle movements involved in cutting up books and magazines. Whilst cutting out photographs, I often try to make the empathetic leap of what it must have been like to lie naked on a shag pile rug in a chalet in 1975? The Pretty Girls series perfectly illustrates the claustrophobia. I ponder how the woman would have moved unclothed through such an intimate space all the time monitored through the male lens.
Ideas for performance, for fleshing out and inhabiting the imagined world of another then emerge. I invite others to join me in this visceral experiment, ending the solitary confinement of the monteur. Together we make flesh out of images made of paper.
Often my son, Maxwell Sterling, composes soundtracks or at other times we invite musical improvisation so that both dancers and musicians have no idea of what will happen next. This keeps us all on our toes.
JH: Do you see music as a form of collage, rhythm, noise, repetition and if so, how did that inform your visual language?
LS: I always have to listen to music as I work. The right soundtrack will sometimes influence my choice of imagery and its subsequent placement. When looking at works from decades ago, I can often recall what I was listening to at that time. I’ve studied Indian music for over a decade now, I play the dilruba - “the heart stealer” - along with a twenty-stringed instrument in the shape of a peacock. Time in Indian music is far more complex than in the west, its intricate rhythms were ungraspable at first. As I reflect, my photomontages have at times become far more complex too.
JH: Your work is being rediscovered by new generations who see it as prophetic. How do you feel about being read forward in time?
LS: It’s wonderful! I feel that I haven’t lived in vain when a eighteen-year-old looks at a photomontage depicting a woman with a iron covering her face in 1976, then sees that woman as a cyborg co-opting the domestic sphere for her superpowers.
I look to the young for new readings which have been discretely embedded in the works for over half a century. Sixteen-year-old prophets educate and inspire me, one shouted out, “No Dysons, no Dysons!” as if on a protest march when she looked at the 1970s interiors in my early works.
I hope that in a hundred years, different meanings again will accrete and educate via present paper, scissors and glue. Poppets all.
“Linder: Goddess of the Mind," presented by CHANEL Nexus Hall, is on view at The Museum of Kyoto Annex April 18-May 17, 2026
