Linder.

Danger Came Smiling.

This past weekend, I met with a couple of friends to visit an exhibition at the Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh before it closed, Linder: Danger Came Smiling. The exhibition was the first retrospective the artist Linder has held in Scotland and showcased artworks from over fifty years of her career, beginning with her early work during the 1970s Manchester punk scene and continuing to the present day. Much of the work included in the retrospective centred on her fascination with plants and invited viewers to look beyond traditional ideas of gender and sexuality (RBGE, 2025).

As described by the exhibition introduction:

“At the heart of Linder’s work lies a masterful manipulation of found imagery. Her iconic photomontages, sourced from pornography, fashion magazines and consumer catalogues, dissect and reassemble society’s visual stories with surgical precision and provocative humour. In the process, she confronts conventional assumptions about gender, identity and sexuality.

Her work mixes both charm and menace: ‘I like to see how far I can ramp up desire within one image until it becomes grotesquely comic.’ Linder invites us to go beyond the superficial, offering new ways of understanding how social identity and relations of power are reinforced through everyday imagery.”

Spanning several rooms of Inverleith House at the centre of the Botanic Gardens, the exhibition contained a wide range of photomontages, photographs, prints, videos, and installations. Across these spaces, the artworks explored Linder’s fascination with plants and her frequent use of botanical motifs, shifting in tone from playful to punk to overtly political.

Whenever I visit an exhibition, I try to look beyond the surface of the artwork on display. I want to understand what sits behind it, why the artist chose that particular brush, that colour, that symbol, and what deeper histories might be at play. What struck me most here was the recurring use of plant motifs that threaded through much of the work, from her early pieces emerging from the Manchester punk scene to her more recent creations.

It was particularly interesting to read about why Linder had chosen certain plant motifs in her work and to try to understand some of the stories or steps that might have led to those decisions. Alongside this, there was also complementary commentary about Linder’s inspirations, drawn from histories and stories that related specifically to the Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh and the plants they housed. One such pair of stories that stood out to me was about orchids.

From the Botanic Gardens’ commentary, there was a story about how orchids were part of a key event in 1913 during the suffragette movement:

“In 1913, suffragettes attacked the orchid house at Kew. They smashed the glass cloches containing the most delicate specimens. Were the most vicious blows reserved for those fragile orchids since women objected to being treated like delicate hothouse flowers? This became a powerful act of defiance in the struggle for equality.

Orchids have always fascinated us. This fascination is reflected in cultural associations including gender and femininity. The Ancient Greek philosopher Theophrastus named the genus Orchis as the terrestrial orchid’s roots resemble male testicles; their Middle English name was bollockwort. A mania for collecting tropical orchids, dubbed orchidelirium, began in the 1800s. Part of their allure was the challenge they posed to gardeners. But not everyone could participate. The professional gardening world long remained male-dominated and only began accepting female apprentices in the late 1890s.”

Alongside this commentary, Linder reflected on her own history with orchids:

“As a young woman in the 1980s, I was gifted a single orchid by a boyfriend. I’d announced I wanted to break up, perhaps this was a way to win me back. Orchids then were seen as rare and delicate flowers and therefore the perfect gift from a lover to a female recipient. Orchids are no longer signifiers of love, no longer a rarity and they’re far more robust, they don’t wilt quite so quickly.

I’m fascinated by that which is both eerie and seductive. I often cut out and position flower motifs far larger than the cut-out human figures in my photomontages. Playing with scale is a key part of what I do. I was always fascinated by Alice in Wonderland and how Alice shapeshifted to become larger or smaller. So it is that a photograph of a delicate orchid can be positioned within the pictorial plane to dominate a landscape, subsuming shrinking inhabitants and their dwellings.”

It was this parallel commentary that stood out to me and that I found particularly interesting. Most exhibitions I have visited in recent memory tend to include commentary from only one viewpoint, slightly removed from the artist’s voice, as it is usually written in the third person or by the curators. Occasionally, more commonly in exhibitions featuring historical works, the commentary includes historical reference points about the artist’s life, but always through the perspective of an art historian.

The additions from the Botanic Gardens also taught me a lot about our own history, some things I had never come across before, such as the story of the suffragettes destroying the orchids in protest for equal rights, or the experiences of some of the first female gardeners at the Botanics and how they paved the way for more women to enter the field in the years and decades that followed.

This exhibition also featured one of the first artworks I have seen in person that directly responded to deepfakes, which are becoming increasingly prevalent in our digitally driven society. It is something we are hearing more about in the news, and it is one of those things that I find almost incomprehensible. It feels like such a violation of identity and selfhood that any sense of safety must be completely shattered. Linder’s response to deepfakes brought this issue firmly into focus, confronting the viewer and refusing to let the subject be ignored. She also used her own face in the artwork as a way of reclaiming her image and transforming it into something more powerful, something that can speak to future generations as our digital world continues to grow and contort into something larger and perhaps unrecognisable from where we stand today.

What I found most striking about this exhibition was how Linder’s work managed to bridge the personal and the political while still feeling grounded in the natural world. There was a sense of reclamation that threaded through everything, whether through the orchid stories, the feminist undertones, or her response to deepfakes. The use of her own image felt both vulnerable and defiant, as though she was choosing to face the distortion head-on and transform it into something meaningful.

It made me think about how, in my own practice, I often return to the natural world as a way of grounding myself and making sense of things that feel overwhelming or abstract. For Linder, the botanical seemed to serve as a mirror for humanity’s complexities and contradictions, while for me, it offers a quiet form of connection and belonging. There is something about nature that allows for both fragility and strength, a duality that I am always drawn to when working in ink.

Leaving the exhibition, I kept thinking about how artists continually find new ways to reclaim their narratives, whether through plants, photomontage, or digital resistance. It reminded me of the importance of holding space for reflection in an increasingly fast-paced and technological world, and of remaining open to the small, organic moments where new ideas begin to form.

References:

Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (2025) Linder: Danger Came Smiling. Available at: https://www.rbge.org.uk/whats-on/linder-danger-came-smiling/61197/ (Accessed: 19 October 2025).