Fierce Tenderness: Linder Sterling @ Mount Stuart

Inside the thoughtfully partitioned architecture of Mount Stuart, Linder stages a performance of glamour. Audiences gather around three sides of the central hall, seated in backed chairs. From the moment the performers crawl in from the margins of the stage, or gaze down from the upper balcony, we begin to lean forward, watching, guessing, interpreting. What are the performers thinking? What are they trying to convey? But this is never about answers. The piece unfolds as an open-ended exploration of intuitive risk and attentive care.

Mount Stuart, with its expansive scale and historic aura, becomes an active participant, being referenced and re-scripted within another cultural power structure. The corridors, colour palette, light, and live soundscape form the ecosystem for what is going to happen. This interplay gives the work its particular charge of site-specificity.

The sound score initiates the performance, giving momentum. Soon it recedes into the periphery, becoming an undercurrent that subtly pulls the performers’ rhythm, drawing out the exchange between bodies and this architectural space. Among the four performers, a deeply embodied relation emerges. Their motions ripple like droplets across the surface of a still lake. Barely audible movements gradually stir the vaulted space, they engage in a non-verbal dialogue, moving like four constantly shifting atoms, pulling, retreating, listening, mimicking, colliding, pausing, reacting, attacking, surrendering. Responsive in the most instinctive sense, in this vast, squared chamber, the performers break stasis when introducing disorder into order, contingency into movements that are heard and seen.

Every rise and fall enacts a kind of rebirth, a cycle of deconstructing and regenerating, of endless waves and returns. Boundaries blur between violence and protection, aggression and care, pause and momentum, release and demise. Different denotations co-exist within the same stroke, a hand extended might be to kill or to cradle. Meaning is shaped by its affective charge and other existences that receive it. Each gesture becomes a slice of experience, a moment of concealment, a fleeting internal projection. Metaphors and relations shift rapidly but never disrupt the cohesion, tension is contained rather than released, the performance holds together with gentleness and clarity.

It navigates a dual aesthetic logic. Its 'antiquity' lies in the symbolic imagery. Feathers, scales, forests, galaxies, burning stars; cosmological in scale, refusing the centrality of the human. Its 'modernity' is tactile, unstable, fluid. Layered textures, fragmented narrative, sensuous materiality. The body becomes both medium and message. Grandeur it confronts not, but presents with radical sincerity.

Changyi the goddess of moon governs the months through the moon’s cycle, not through control; Xihe the mother of sun does not create the sun, but guides it across the sky. In Taoism, one must stop listening with the ears or with the mind. Falling into the gap between perception and reality, everything appears to us with infinity yet we are limited. The only approach to grasp the truth is to let go. This improvisational montage results in a fragmental yet coherent psychological map, and the acts manifest a cultivated permeability. It uncovers shared grains and invisible connections, cleanses doors of perception through recalibration; vulnerability is revealed without spectacle.

When the sound and action cease, the experience extends into the concurrent exhibition, where Linder’s new series of collages respond to rarely seen archival images from Mount Stuart’s collection. As in the performance, these works re-narrate, often through a feminist lens. Her signature photomontage practice reclaims what has been aestheticised into disappearance, or rendered illegible. Hiding in exposure, feeling safe in exaggeration. In an era where collage is a saturated aesthetic trope, Linder’s collaging is strategic, maintaining a sharply personal vocabulary. Just like a slight shift in the weight of the rain, the size of sea snails’ call, the brightness of lining, just enough to anchor the opinions.

And perhaps this debut is a prelude. Through collage, embodied practice, and spatial dialogue, Linder opens a broader inquiry: heritage, feminist corporeality, posthuman perspectives, botanical consciousness, the politics of care and visibility. After this debut, one cannot help but wonder: what will happen when this work meets another space, another ecosystem? What new resonances might ripple through another forest, across another lake? What she offers is not resolution, but an invitation to cross the perceptual threshold, into a terrain where fierce emotion and careful construction coexist.

And perhaps that, too, is a form of glamour.

---

A kind of glamour about me, Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute, until 31 Aug, open daily, 11.30am-4pm

Improvised performance: A kind of glamour about me, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, 7 Aug, sold out; Linder: Danger Came Smiling, Royal Botanic Garden, until 19 Oct, open daily, 10.30am-4.30pm, both part of Edinburgh Art Festival