5 things to know about Linder: Danger Came Smiling

Born in Liverpool, the pioneering feminist has become well-known for her radical and humorous photomontages.

From February to May 2025, the Hayward Gallery presented Danger Came Smiling, the first London retrospective of the artist’s work . Exploring her five decades as an artist, the exhibition moves from her early work within the Manchester punk scene to new work shown here for the first time.

Whether you’re already familiar with the artist or new to her remarkable body of work, here are five things to know about Linder and Danger Came Smiling.

Her work has its roots in the punk movement of the 1970s

Danger Came Smiling includes the work that established Linder’s distinctive visual language, made while she was still a student of graphic design at Manchester Polytechnic in the mid 1970s. Linder became part of Manchester’s emerging punk scene, with her work featuring on record covers, notably The Buzzcocks’ 1977 single ‘Orgasm Addict’ and Magazine’s 1978 debut album Real Life. Linder also founded the post-punk band Ludus who were active from 1978 to 1984.

Smiles are a recurring feature of Linder’s work

The title of this exhibition, Danger Came Smiling, is taken from the 1982 Ludus album of the same name. It’s a title that also speaks for much of the artist’s work, where oversized, upturned and out of context smiles feature as a motif within her photomontage works, accentuating the idea that the models in her found images are wearing a mask of pleasure or happiness. Danger Came Smiling speaks of the disarming nature of a smile, which can cause us to let down our guard, but at the same time may, in the nature of a false smile, hide something untoward or threatening. Much of Linder’s work is focussed on exposing elements of danger in the most mundane and banal images to which we have been desensitised owing to their everyday normality.

She is drawn to a working-class take on glamour

A particularly working class take on glamour has long-fascinated the artist, from the aspirational shoe-string glamour of the Liverpool women of her childhood, to the glamour affected by the men she witnessed attending Dickens nightclub in the 1970s, who would change in and out of their drag outfits only when safely inside the club.

Linder’s photographic series SheShe (1981), which features the artist herself in a series of portraits made in collaboration with the photographer birrer, links glamour to elements of masquerade and concealment. In recent years the artist’s fascination with glamour has led to her collaborating with a number of fashion designers, including Richard Nicoll, Louise Gray, Christopher Shannon and Ashish Gupta.

She is a virtuoso of photomontage

Linder is undoubtedly best known for her photomontage works. Using a Swann-Morton surgical-grade scalpel to cut out photographic images from magazines and other printed media, she recombines contrasting elements into singular works that, especially when viewed in retrospect, offer uncanny insights into the public psyche of the time.

Early examples of Linder’s practice include her 1977 series Pretty Girls which marries pictures of naked pin-ups with images of household appliances from consumer magazines, equating the desire for the body with a desire for products in a subversive take on post-war consumer culture.

She has a deep interest in ballet

Linder’s interest in ballet extends back to her childhood, when she had a collection of ballet annuals, which she credits with helping her see the stage as a transformative space, one which effectively blurred the boundaries between women and men.‘Looking at those annuals, I realised that there was a parallel universe where both men and women could wear tights, eyeliner and eyeshadow. This was extraordinarily thrilling to my young mind.’ 

Almost half a century later Linder got to take that interest to a new level when she worked with choreographer Kenneth Tindall and Northern Ballet to create her first ballet, The Ultimate Form. She went on to work with Tindall on a second ballet, Children of the Mantic Stain, inspired by artists Ithell Colquhoun and Barbara Hepworth. Some of the costumes from these ballets, which Linder produced with Richard Nicoll, are on display in the exhibition.