– Paul Greenhalgh, former Director of the Zaha Hadid Foundation, and author of ‘Ceramic, Art and Civilisation’

Inspired by her ancestral traditions, Sormin’s clay forms and hand-cut watercolour paintings draw from creation myths – such as a Batak goddess who sprinkles dirt on the back of a sea dragon, or 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.

This collection of Sormin’s recent work engaged 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 were 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 were three 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.