Born in Bangkok, Thailand, Linda 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). Her first solo museum exhibition will open in November 2025 at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto. Sormin lives and works in New York City.
Since the early 2000’s, Sormin 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 Museum of Fine Arts Boston (Boston, MA, USA), Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, DC, USA), Gardiner Museum (Toronto, ON, Canada), 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).
Artist Statement
Drawing from my Indonesian, Thai, and Chinese culture, myths, and ancestral history, I approach storytelling as non-linear assemblages of fact and fiction. Lightly rolling, pinching and “unbuilding” clay sculptures and mixed media forms, I embed ceramics and cultural debris into structures disgorging color and place. My paintings, sculptures and installations reflect familial and personal experiences of upheaval and migration. Processes of rhythmic hand making create intricate networks that link together seemingly disparate images and ideas. I cut, bend, pierce and collage fragments of clay and handbuilt ceramic forms, cut and assemble paintings and mixed media sculptures. In small pieces and large-scale installations, I attempt to hold the complex layers and tense contradictions of my life as an immigrant to North America.
Inspired by my ancestral traditions, clay forms and hand-cut watercolour paintings are inspired creation myths of: a Batak goddess who sprinkles dirt on the back of a sea dragon, the tiger which symbolises anti-colonialism in Indonesian art, and my great-great-grandfather, a Batak shaman who resisted colonialism in the late 1800s. Hand-drawn sketches and digital scans of historic shaman’s books (which I first encountered at the British Library in 2022) find their way into videos, sound work, paintings and sculpture. Since my ancestors were separated from generations of inherited knowledge by colonialism, I try to mend gaps with both delicate and tough materials, acknowledging that healing involves difficult, and often contradictory ways of being.
