Drawing from her Indonesian, Thai, and Chinese heritage, Linda Sormin approaches storytelling as a non-linear assemblage of fact and fiction. She lightly rolls, pinches, and “unbuilds” clay sculptures and mixed media forms, embedding ceramics and cultural debris into structures that disgorge color and place. Her paintings, sculptures, and installations reflect familial and personal experiences of upheaval and migration. Through rhythmic hand-making processes, she creates intricate networks that connect seemingly disparate images and ideas. Sormin cuts, bends, pierces, and collages fragments of clay and handbuilt ceramic forms, assembling paintings and mixed media sculptures. In both small pieces and large-scale installations, she strives to hold the complex layers and tense contradictions of her life as an immigrant to North America.
Inspired by her ancestral traditions, Sormin’s clay forms and hand-cut watercolor paintings draw from creation myths—such as a Batak goddess who sprinkles dirt on the back of a sea dragon, the tiger as a symbol of anti-colonialism in Indonesian art, and her great-great-grandfather, a Batak shaman who resisted colonialism in the late 1800s. Hand-drawn sketches and digital scans of historic shaman’s books—first encountered at the British Library in 2022—find their way into her videos, sound works, paintings, and sculptures. Aware that her ancestors were separated from generations of inherited knowledge due to colonialism, Sormin attempts to mend these gaps using both delicate and resilient materials. Her practice acknowledges that healing involves difficult, and often contradictory, ways of being.
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).
This collection of recent work Linda Sormin engages deeply with her ancestral history exploring the myths and legacies of her familial stories and enacting the resurrection and reinvigoration of language and knowledge through research and artistic practice. Central to this exhibition are works on watercolour paper that recall pustaha—traditional Batak manuscript books, crafted from tree bark and used by shamans to record spells, divination texts, and ancestral knowledge. Included in the exhibition are two of Sormin’s ceramic sculptures, which continue her long-standing engagement with fragmentation, migration, and the materiality of memory. These elements share a continuity with her drawings, acknowledging rupture and loss, but also offer space for transformation. In this interplay materials and methods of making, Sormin’s work and the research supporting and enriching this process, embrace the potential healing of inherited histories.
