Spirit Wash, 2020

"It is so important that all children get to experience art and have the opportunity to express themselves creatively. With the focus in schools being on more academic subjects it is wonderful that The Hepworth Wakefield has established this programme to help teachers incorporate creativity across the curriculum and that is why I was delighted to take part." Linder Sterling

This print was produced for the 2020 edition of The Hepworth Wakefield's School Prints.

Linder Sterling, born in Liverpool in 1954, is known for her photography, radical feminist photomontage and confrontational performance art. Emerging from the Manchester punk and post-punk scenes in the 1970s, Sterling focuses on questions of gender, commodity and display. Her photomontage practice combines everyday images from domestic or fashion magazines with images from pornography and other archival material. Cut and collaged by hand using a scalpel and glue, the juxtapositions recall a rich art history harking back to Hannah H̦ch and the Dadaists. For her solo shows at The Hepworth Wakefield and Tate St Ives in 2013, Sterling collaborated with choreographer Kenneth Tindall of Northern Ballet for a performance piece, The Ultimate Form (2013), inspired by the artist's research into the work of Barbara Hepworth.

Her residency at Tate St Ives, also in 2013 was recently followed by her appointment in 2017 as the inaugural artist-in-residence of Chatsworth House where Sterling created four installations that explored the female voice at Chatsworth in the centenary year of the Act of Representation. In 2018, Sterling was commissioned by Art on the Underground to create her first large-scale public commission consisting of an 85-metre long street-level billboard at Southwark station.