Linder Sterling’s performances and visual art are rooted in her past as a graphic design student at Manchester Polytechnic and her eternally present feminism. A contributor to i-D since 2007, she has also provided collages and silk-screens for the fashion designer Richard Nicoll since 2009, and continues to give rigorous collaborative performances. Linder’s collage work, which juxtaposes images from women’s magazines and pornography, had its first exposure in The Secret Public fanzine and as the cover of the Buzzcocks’ first single, Orgasm Addict. Performing with her group Ludus, most notoriously at the Haçienda while wearing a black vibrator, the vegetarian performer was wearing meat dresses when Lady Gaga was but a zygote. Linder’s photography of Morrissey has appeared as sleeve photographs for his LPs Your Arsenal and Beethoven Was Deaf. Her formative contributions to the aesthetics of punk and its offshoots have only recently received wider recognition, with shows in galleries all over the world including Newcastle’s BALTIC, the British Council in Prague and at the Tate Triennial in 2006.
