Linder’s large-scale photomontage transforms the diminutive Artist’s Hut into a pageant, originally the moveable stage for theatrical performances. The portrait of Aletheia presides over the Artist’s Garden: SHE IS HERE. Seated, she welcomes us, her guests, as if alighting from moorings on The Thames, walking among the Arundel Marbles, processing through the colonnade, a time tunnel at the end of which Linder imagines the unfolding of a contemporary ‘Masque of Queens’. Cast as Hypsicrateia (meaning ‘rule on high’) ‘who always displayed a right manly spirit and extravagant daring’, Aletheia performed extravagantly in these opulent performances written by Ben Jonson with set designs by Inigo Jones. The aristocratic masque-performers restored order, driving off the chaotic prelude of the ‘antimasque’ comprising twelve witches, screeching and casting spells – enacting a creative justification of the witch hunts which pervaded Aletheia’s turbulent times. The witch hunts remain a constant preoccupation for Linder, both for their persecution of women (who remain unpardoned in England) and the demonisation of the spiritual. Paradoxically, Aletheia’s publication ‘Natura exenterata: or Nature unbowelled’, 1655, which contained a compilation of 1,720 herbal concoctions combining medicine, chemistry and cookery escaped the accusations of witchcraft which often accompanied a woman’s profound understanding of the power of plants. SHE IS HERE re-calls the witches and creates the artistic conditions for the re-evaluation of the spiritual and the occult.

It does so with Linder’s trademark glamour. The words SHE IS HERE are emblazoned across the back of the Artist’s Hut in vast capitalised, letters in Glamour Grotesque font visible from Temple Place and reflected in the cold glass of the uninhabited building it faces. Linder’s work often examines ‘glamour’. Meaning magic or enchantment, it derives from ‘grammar’ ‘scholarship particularly in occult learning’, drawing us to question the enduring and alluring qualities of glamour personified in historical figures (Aletheia) and its magical enactments in the modern and contemporary worlds of fashion, pornography and celebrity.

SHE IS HERE asserts the importance of women across time, in bowers of bliss fashioned by them, harnessing glamour in the service of defiance, power and permanence.

Claire Mander, Director of theCOLAB says, “Linder’s new commission for the Artist’s Garden reveals, for the first time in three dimensions and at huge scale, the complex layers and nuances of women, their representation, persecution and objectification across time. Weaponising glamour, SHE IS HERE, is an alluring and defiant assertion of the eternal and mystical power of women, for all of London’s publics to admire.”