The Gardiner Museum in Toronto proudly presents Linda Rotua Sormin: Uncertain Ground, the artist’s first solo museum exhibition and largest project to date. The culmination of over 20 years of remarkable exploration and innovation, Uncertain Ground opens on November 6, 2025, in conjunction with the reveal of the Gardiner’s transformed ground floor, the Museum’s largest capital project in two decades.
In this ceramics and mixed media installation, Sormin, who was raised in Thailand and Canada, investigates her family’s roots in Indonesia, drawing on Batak mythology to create a richly layered exploration of how life in today’s cosmopolitan city intersects with ancestral memories and the need for spiritual belonging.
Sormin’s towering web-like assemblages of raw clay, ceramics, metal, wood, paper, and found objects transform the Gardiner’s Exhibition Hall into an immersive world that is at once awe-inspiring and intimate. Colonial artifacts, everyday kitsch, and fragments from the artist’s studio floor dangle and nestle within the latticework. The low murmur of distant voices envelopes the space.
The exhibition unfolds on three levels: a central raised platform evokes a volcanic lake with an underworld of mythical beasts and coded divination texts; a tangle of precarious ceramic sculptures suggests an earthly middle ground inhabited by humans; and a suspended projection screen references a celestial realm of spirits and birds. The result is an environment that feels alive and in motion, offering audiences an encounter that is both visceral and contemplative.
Commissioned by the Gardiner Museum, the exhibition brings together clay, sculpture, video, sound, hand-cut watercolour painting, and digital fabrication in a multi-sensory environment where roosters, tigers, dragons, and sacred texts serve as portals into ancient knowledge.
“Linda Rotua Sormin’s fearless, monumental structures have established her as a leading voice in sculpture,” says Dr. Sequoia Miller, Chief Curator & Deputy Director of the Gardiner Museum. “She consistently pushes the medium into new realms of scale, meaning, and material exploration. It’s fitting that her bold and deeply resonant work will debut at the Gardiner as we also mark the reopening of our transformed ground floor, signaling a dynamic new chapter for the Museum.”
In Uncertain Ground, Sormin delves into her lineage among the Batak people of Sumatra in the Indonesian archipelago, weaving a narrative that is both deeply personal and invites visitors to reflect on their own layered experiences. The exhibition tells the story of the artist’s grandmother’s grandfather’s forced conversion from shamanic leader to Christian follower, bringing to life a rich family history of spiritual practices fragmented by colonialism, Christianization, and diaspora.
Sormin researched traditional Batak divination books held in European museum collections with strictly controlled access, as well as the script and spoken language of her ancestors.
“For twenty years, I’ve fed found, broken bits of ceramic into sculptures and installations—my hand-pinched forms have a big appetite for porcelain figurines and other discarded objects,” says Sormin. “Five years ago, I learned that Batak shamans traditionally used pottery from China, Vietnam, and Thailand in their spiritual practices, carving Batak imagery into wooden stoppers that sealed these vessels. Realizing that my impulse to gather and remake is part of an old lineage shifted everything in my work—storytelling started to happen through video, painting, and the voices of my family.”
