The direction both women face makes them an appropriate pairing. In Linder’s photomontages Capital Gate and Penetrating Inside, the artificial poses of these women, looking and contemplating, meets the awkwardness of the angles of the furniture; the fabrics to fabrics. The photomontages, rigorously composed, mirror the interventionist strategy of Mount Stuart House itself: to play within a seemingly immutable historical fabric. All contemporary works, including Linder’s, stick out.

All of her montages reveal their own construction, painstakingly assembled by hand, with scalpel, chosen imagery and a critical eye. Seeing these works in their Victorian, neo-Gothic surroundings, which barely have a surface free of opulent antiquities, further complicates our relationship to the aspirational 20th-century magazine image. These images, which sell us desire, travel and environments to pursue, are juxtaposed with a doubly charged environment: desirable design objects and women, all set against the heaviness of history. As viewers, the layering invites us to edit and translate what we see, letting go of familiar associations to embrace something more uncertain.

Above, Linder, A kind of glamour about me (2025), installation shot including He was part of my dream, of course-but then I was part of his dream, too, iii and iv and The Visit i-xii (2025), Mount Stuart. Photo by Keith Hunter. Courtesy of the artist and Modern Art, London

In one image, a sofa and chair hover over a woman picking up the orange hues of a carefully placed ashtray and the bauble of an earring. In the background, the tree carefully echoes the flora in the woman’s light, hooded jumpsuit. The setting suggests an exotic, luxurious location – with architecture nodding to southeast Asia – though the model is white. The sofa, apparently weightless over her body, where it would be a weighted object to recline on, sparks many radical moments in art historical imagery: Édouard Manet’s painting Olympia, Richard Hamilton’s 1956 collage Just What is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?

In Penetrating Inside, the styling and shoot location are more mundane, but the furniture and objects on the glass table – perhaps an H-shaped Hermès sun lounger? – gain heightened significance. The presentation of the items speaks to the affective landscapes of desire in a pre-attention economy era, which is idealised and aspirational.

Linder spoke of her interest in “glamour” and “grammar” having the same etymological root, coming to English from Scots (the English language as spoken in Scotland in the early 1700s). The Scots altered the English word “grammar” to create glamer, which meant “a magic spell”. By the early 1900s, the word glamour came to be associated with attractiveness and luxury – its meaning following a trajectory from the supernatural to the desirable. In the time since, glamour has become overwhelmingly associated with visual opulence and, in the later 2oth century, with an exploding world of image-making and glossy magazines. While grammar governs the rules of language and meaning, Linder interrogates glamour through her visual syntax – using the principles of montage to construct new meanings and perspectives, to enchant and unsettle at once. .