Linder, Pretty Girl Series 1977. Image courtesy the artist and Stuart Shave/Modern Art

One of the key artists in the British punk and post-punk movement, Linder, is currently showing a photographic collage exhibition at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead.

The exhibition contains work from her Pretty Girl No. 1 series and is showing in the gallery’s Cube Space until October 14 2007.

In a 30-year career that got underway in the late 1970s Linder has worked with a variety of artists, writers and musicians to produce collages, photomontage, music, film and performance.

Linder, Pretty Girl Series 1977. Image courtesy the artist and Stuart Shave/Modern Art

Her first impact on the public consciousness was through her early punk collages seen in the self published fanzine The Secret Public and on the sleeve for the Buzzcocks debut single, Orgasm Addict.

The latter featured a naked woman with an iron for a head and smiling lips instead of nipples.

These confrontational images, bringing together imagery of pornography and kitchen appliances, were genuinely progressive at a time when pornography was not regarded as ubiquitous.

Linder, Pretty Girl Series 1977. Image courtesy the artist and Stuart Shave/Modern Art

Pretty Girl No. 1 returns to these early punk rock beginnings with a series of raw juxtapositions that overlay nude female figures with household domestic appliances such as TVs, vacuum cleaners and cookers

The photomontages also use backdrops taken from 1970s furnishing catalogues and the pristine and neutral environments contrast awkwardly with the nude hybrid creatures that inhabit them.

The work is intended as a challenge to both the sexuality and domesticity of women and as an attack on conventional female roles and representation.

Linder, Pretty Girl Series 1977. Image courtesy the artist and Stuart Shave/Modern Art

Over the course a career that has encapsulated journalism, writing, film – not to mention the continued close friendship of Morrissey – Linder has continued to unite fantastical and political elements in her collages, adapting them to her own specific concerns.