Linder: A kind of glamour about me
Intoxicating spells cast by a feminist art icon on a visit to Mount Stuart on the Isle of Bute
There’s a frisson of excitement (if not quite glamour) one feels on boarding a ferry to travel to an island, even on as drench and grey as the Saturday I travel from Wemyss Bay to Rothesay on the Isle of Bute. With its curved glass and iron structure, greenery, and vintage railway posters, Wemyss Bay station exudes a faded grandeur that conjures romantic images of the Victorian golden age of train travel. Ferry passengers follow a winding arch that funnels them onto their waiting vessel, away from the mainland and off across the Firth of Clyde. From Rothesay, I’m driven up the coast and into Bute’s lush countryside, where suddenly another Victorian gem, the stately manor house Mount Stuart, emerges.
Nestled in extensive, beautifully manicured gardens, the mansion is the ancestral home of the Marquess of Bute. It’s still the official family seat of the Crichton-Stuarts, but is now maintained by the Mount Stuart Trust, which programmes arts, cultural, and educational programmes. This summer (15 June to 31 August), Mount Stuart stages an exciting multimedia project by iconic feminist artist Linder Stirling (a.k.a Linder): A kind of glamour about me. Co-commissioned along with EAF (Edinburgh Art Festival), it complements Linder’s retrospective exhibition (Linder: Danger Came Calling) at Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh, part of EAF25.
Simply stepping into Mount Stuart is awe-inspiring. Its Gothic architecture opens to reveal an opulent, highly decorative interior inspired by astrology and mythology. Each room is a masterpiece of craftsmanship, featuring highly wrought wood panelling, stunning stained glass, and teeming with antique books, paintings, tapestries, anthropomorphic furniture, and unusual objets d’art. Before exploring Linder’s intervention’s across Mount Stuart’s labyrinthine domestic space, guest are seated in the exquisite marble hall, where towering columns support a glittering vaulted ceiling, on which glass crystals and stained glass depict the signs of the zodiac and the seasons. Below, a pair of Scottish George V tapestries, woven at Edinburgh’s Dovecot studios in the early twentieth century, adorn the walls. Woven in wool, silk, and metallic thread, the tapestries depict Scottish foliage, hunting scenes and images of a Highland Games, each rich in symbolism.
The performance piece of A kind of glamour about me - created by Linder in collaboration with Holly Blakely (movement), Maxwell Sterling (sound), and Ashish Gupta (costume) - conjures into being the scenes, textures, and symbolism that adorn Mount Stuart’s interiors and collection. Bodies emerge from oversized tassels, limbs bloom out of tinsel and shimmering silks, a tree trunk forked like stag horns is paraded around the floor.
The performance creates a palpable sense of darkness and menace. Like a cult of woodland nymphs, the performers gyrate, merge, and collapse into each other in a frenzy of ecstasy. Drawing from scenes of hunting and the natural world, the rhythmic coming together and severing of the performers’ bodies is shot through with violent energy. Lust, death, and a manic rebirth play out under the hall’s sparkling ceiling, calling to mind the violent fecundity of the natural landscape surrounding Mount Stuart, but also, perhaps, the violent encroachment of wealth and power on that landscape.
The dazzle of Ashish’s costumes hold a mirror to the mansion’s opulence, further throwing into relief the many ways that the decorative encodes hidden messages and speaks of the ideologies and beliefs that brought it into being - the decorative is never simply a surface. Central to the performance, a modular tapestry created by Linder in dialogue with Ashish’s costumes and crafted by the master weavers of West Dean Tapestry studio, is a sensuous new rendering of Linder’s photomontage practice. Featuring fragments of body parts and adornments, it weaves around the performers’ bodies, alternately obscuring and conjuring strange forms.
As the performance reaches its climax and the tapestry spirits the performers away, the spell ends and tension slowly dissipates. Attention turns to the ‘traces’ that Linder weaves through Mount Stuarts rooms, including works of photomontage, costumes, fragments of tinsel and glitter. These interventions highlight the inherent strangeness of artifice and decoration, drawing attention to the elisions, odd juxtapositions, and tensions that exist in such a historic, prestigious environment as Mount Stuart.
In putting together A kind of glamour about me, Linder drew on the Scottish etymology of the world glamour. Originally rooted in ‘gramayre’, meaning learning and knowledge, ‘glamer’ emerged in eighteenth century Scotland, meaning magic, enchantment, or a spell, specifically one that affected the sight or made objects appear different to their reality. It was anglicised and popularised by Walter Scott, who wrote in a diary: ‘Got home about two o'clock, and set to correct a set of proofs. …There is a kind of glamour about me, which sometimes makes me read dates, etc., in the proof-sheets, not as they actually do stand, but as they ought to stand. I wonder if a pill of holy trefoil would dispel this fascination’; elsewhere in a poem, he again invoked glamour’s transformational power:
“You may bethink you of the spell / Of that sly urchin page / This to his lord did impart / And made him seem, by glamour art / A knight from Hermitage”.
In dialogue with Mount Stuart’s astrological and mythical inspired art and decoration, Linder returns glamour to its magical roots. It’s intoxicating, transformative, but never quite what it seems.
As I’m whisked away from the heady, kaleidoscopic vision that cast its spell over Mount Stuart, the taxi driver chats animatedly about the house’s more recent history - did I know Stella McCartney’s wedding took place there? We approach the harbour, where a helicopter slowly descends through the drizzle onto a superyacht floating below, a behemoth dominating the backdrop of braes and brooding West Coast sky. The driver informs me it’s worth £134 million and owned by an American billionaire. As I step onto my own, much more modest mode of transport and head back to the mainland, I think that perhaps we’d all benefit from more of Linder’s glamour, and less of that lavished by celebrities and billionaires.
Performance Image credit: Linder, A kind of glamour about me, Mount Stuart, 2025. Devised Performance co-commissioned by Mount Stuart and EAF. Dancers: Sophie Ormiston, Sari Mizoe, Luigi Lyon Nardone and Willow Fenner. Costume: Ashish Gupta. Composer and Musician: Maxwell Sterling. Photo by Hazel Gaskin.
Linder: A kind of glamour about me continues at Mount Stuart until 31 August.
A second iteration of the improvised performance A kind of glamour about me will take place on 7 August, to open EAF25 on the Oak Lawn at Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.
Linder: Danger Came Smiling is at Inverleith House Gallery, Edinburgh until 19 October.