November 6, 2025 – April 12, 2026
Linda Rotua Sormin: Uncertain Ground
November 2025 – April 12, 2026
Special Exhibition Hall. 3rd Floor
Included with admission. Free for Gardiner Friends.
The low murmur of distant voices surrounds you. The image of a tiger flickers across a door. A rooster peeks through a ceramic thicket. A sinuous dragon swirls overhead. Linda Rotua Sormin: Uncertain Ground is an immersive installation commissioned by the Gardiner Museum that asks how life in the modern, cosmopolitan city can coexist with memories and experiences of our ancestral traditions.
Canadian artist Linda Rotua Sormin has emerged as a leading voice in ceramic sculpture with her fearless, monumental structures. Continually taking clay beyond its limits, Sormin’s web-like forms burst through the boundaries of the medium, literally breaking apart and re-convening in new forms and with novel elements, from colonial museum objects to kitschy figurines to detritus from her teaching studio.
Uncertain Ground is the culmination of over 20 years of remarkable exploration and innovation. Most recently, Sormin has expanded from a ceramic-centered studio practice to one including video, sound, monumental watercolour painting, and digital fabrication, all of which come together in her largest project to date.
For the first time, Sormin delves into her lineage among the Batak people of Sumatra in the Indonesian archipelago, exploring how images and ideas of her ancestors have, sometimes unwittingly, infused her artistic practice. She studied traditional Batak divination books, available to her only in European museum collections, with access strictly controlled, as well as the script and spoken language of her ancestors. Building on her research, Sormin weaves a rich family history of shamanic and other spiritual practices fragmented by colonialism, Christianization, and diaspora.
The exhibition references the three levels of reality in Batak mythology: an upper world of gods and spirits; an earthly realm inhabited by humans; and an underworld rife with mythical beasts and coded divination texts. Multisensory and richly layered, Uncertain Ground embeds raw clay and ceramics within a dynamic matrix of digital media, video, sound, and material processes that honour rich histories of art and spirituality.
About the Artist
Born in Bangkok, Thailand, Linda Rotua Sormin moved to Canada with her family at the age of five. Sormin’s sculptures and site-responsive installations embody the vulnerable and fragmentary nature of her diasporic experience. Recent exhibitions include two large scale installations in Ceramics in the Expanded Field: Sculpture, Performance and the Possibilities of Clay at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA, (2021-23), and Hokusai: Inspiration and Influence at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA (2023).
Sormin lives and works in New York City. Since the early 2000s, she has established a distinct visual and material language, using raw clay, fired ceramics, found objects, and interactive methods. She integrates writing, video, sound, and handcut paintings with clay, metal, and wood. Sormin’s research and writing cast light on how her work has always been influenced—though at times unwittingly—by cultural practices in her family histories rooted in Thailand, China, and Indonesia. Advocating for decolonial approaches in art and education since the early 1990s, when she worked in community development in Laos, she has since taught visual art at Emily Carr University, Rhode Island School of Design, Sheridan College, Alfred University, and currently New York University, where she is a tenured Associate Professor of Studio Art and Head of Ceramics. She holds a BA in English Literature (Andrews University, 1993), a Diploma in Craft and Design (Sheridan College, 2001) and an MFA in Ceramic Art (Alfred University, 2003).
Sormin’s work is included in private and public collections including the permanent collections of the Gardiner Museum (Toronto, ON, Canada), Museum of Fine Arts Boston (Boston, MA, USA), Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, DC, USA), CLAY Museum of Ceramic Art (Middelfart, Denmark), Everson Museum of Art (Syracuse, NY, USA), Victoria & Albert Museum (London, UK), Arizona State University Museum, (Tempe, AZ, USA), World Ceramic Exposition (Gyeonggi Province, Korea), and Alfred Ceramic Art Museum (Alfred, NY, USA).
Photo: David Schmitz
Presenting Sponsors
Thanks To
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