by Natalie Baerselman le Gros
Much has been written about Linda Sormin’s large ceramic installation works, vast multi-part sculptures that dominate the gallery as much as they dominate the literature about her. Their impressive and immersive scale is central to her contemporary use of clay, but her practice is also populated by smaller scale sculptures, those that would fit within the circumference of a wide embrace. Within these, the viewer can offer attention to the detail of Sormin’s practice, both physically and conceptually.
This essay focuses on three of Sormin’s most recent small sculptures: Labyrinth, Spill, and Labor for Those We Love. Made in the last three weeks of Sormin’s 2021 summer residency at EKWC (European Ceramic Work Centre) in the Netherlands, they were exhibited that year at Messums London as part of ‘No Boundaries’, a group show of master Canadian ceramic-practitioners, and in a solo show at Messums Wiltshire in 2022.
Sormin made these three sculptures whilst firing her large installation works for the seminal exhibition ‘Ceramics in the Expanded Field’ at MASS MoCA (2022). There is a temptation to see these smaller works as preliminary sketches for her large installations, however, often her work at a smaller scale occurs upon returning to the studio after the installation of a large sculpture. Sormin is able to condense her ideas from the size of the gallery into small works that continue to dissect and distil those themes that her installations seek to explore and expand. These works, the structures and movements within them, will go on to inform Sormin’s next interaction in the gallery.
All Sormin’s sculptures, large and small, speak of movement and migration, the transitory trek of peoples across the globe, whether forcibly or through choice or adaptation. And with this, Sormin is interested in the human accumulation of stuff (objects, stories, languages, people) and the meaning associated with those objects that are retained and those cast off. Herself a child of changing environs, Sormin was born in Bangkok, Thailand, and moved to Canada at the age of five, she now lives in New York. She is a keen traveller and lived for several years in Thailand and Laos. In 2014, she participated in art residencies in Indonesia, where her father’s family originated. In her large works this manifests itself most obviously in the journey of the viewer as they walk amongst the sculptures, somewhere between architecture and environment. In the smaller works, the mass of twisted clay becomes a contorted diorama, portal-like, devised to transport the viewer but the destination is unknown and the way through unclear. These smaller scale works read as individual recollections, a single diary entry in the great story of migration that is told in her large gallery-sized installations.
Labyrinth is a dichotomy of structure and disorder, visually of two distinct parts: the lower of thick extruded channels of clay, and the upper, a mass of hand-rolled coils, with peeping detritus and suspended loose ends. The overall effect is something of a shipwreck or architectural ruin. The lower section appears engineered, the pieces of extruded pipe are joined together at perfectly welded perpendiculars that remind of a wheel or ladder, now folded under considerable force. The splashed glaze seems to have directional gravity but not of the orientation of the sculpture, reinforcing the perception that this form had a previous life, now collapsed. In contrast the upper tangles seem organic, and the indentations left by palm and finger create rhythmic undulations that appear like creeping vegetation. Different clays and vibrant glazes add variety to the flora, bejewelled in bright coralline. They adorn the lower structure with a softness that suggests growth and amalgamation, nature come to rest, and stray strands still sway in the current or breeze. Sormin is inspired by the ability of nature to transform and reclaim, in particular she remembers getting lost in the labyrinthine ruins of the Ta Prohm temple of Angkor Wat, Cambodia, a site taken over by the vast aerial roots of the Banyan Tree.
Spill appears somehow more violent than the other sculptures. Although compositionally similar, the contrasting elements interact rather than merely coexisting, thick pipes are roughly punched through by thin tubes, like worms dissecting a skeleton. The lower section is less planted and seems drawn up towards the uncontrolled organic mass above, as if it could rock back and forth. The vivid ox-blood red glaze only serves this perception and adds a gory sympathy to this dissected beast, appearing to breathe its last breath and yet forever still.
Labor for Those We Love is the largest of the three sculptures, dense and imposing. Its height is made more so by the larger extruded pipes seeming to push the body of the sculpture higher. The lower, thicker structure of the work is animated into agency and the two compositional elements work together, emphasising the labour for which the piece is titled. Sormin references Jali, the pierced window screens of 17th century Mughal Indian architecture, in her rendering of this opaque jumble, but the effect of the hand-worked clay seems much more organic, more alive – as if peering into a darkened jungle. The intense earthen colours of glaze and raw terracotta clay offer further weight to the composition, and it appears impassable. The colours match that of a large tilted installation work (part of the MASS MoCA exhibition), inspired by the tropical rainforest in Sumatra, Indonesia.
Embedded in Sormin’s sculptures are found and foraged items, ceramic fragments and shards of chinaware, and these objects do many jobs. They reinforce the narrative we have constructed to make sense of what we see before us (because humans will instinctively attempt to find familiar in the unfamiliar) – these objects are the detritus of the site’s previous life. Opposingly, these objects work to remove the sculpture from pure abstraction (and our quest to find representation) and draw our attention to the reality of the work, its materiality in clay and its capacity to be an art object, without representing something else. In many cases they also work to communicate Sormin’s meaning rooted in the work, of an object’s transitory nature, and for ceramic in particular, the multi-layered history of the material.
At the centre of Labor for Those We Love there is a small plate (Sormin refers to it as the heartbeat of the work), drawing the viewer further into the folds of clay. It seems at odds with the overt tension of the sculpture, with its cutesy typography and kitschy imagery, until you notice it is broken, a mere fragment, and it has been tainted by a blood-red glaze tear drop, a chance happening in the kiln. This plate is from an ornamental China giftware series of seven plates, each detailing a household task for every day of the week under the motto ‘it is pleasant to labor for those we love.’ The domestic idyll this plate proffers is not subtle, reinforcing that lifelong coupling of ceramics with the domestic and the decorative, but Sormin counters this historic association of ceramic wares with her decidedly undomesticated sculpture, pushing ceramic into misbehaviour. Also, it manages to contribute to Sormin’s interest in movement and migration, as these plates were manufactured by British pottery Crownford China but for American import, hence the alternative spelling of labour – an object adapted for a new home.
The small china fragment embedded in Spill is reminiscent of typical blue and white Chinese porcelain, wares which were central to a historical colonial and trade association between the Netherlands and Indonesia. In a larger installation work, Sormin refers to Batak Indonesian ceramics, which repurposed imported Chinese pots into containers for ceremonial potions. Sormin works to move beyond a Eurocentric narrative of ceramic. The fragment, a seemingly passive object, is a powerful marker for the violent displacement of people and culture as a result of colonialism. Its broken-ness, and the grisly structure it is enclosed within, draws our attention to the physical and generational wounds of colonial trauma.
Sormin’s sculptures are an essay in ceramic history and a manifesto in ceramic futures. She studied Ceramic Art at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, where she returned 13 years later as a professor and is now an Associate Professor at New York University. Her knowledge and practical skill with clay is demonstrated in her confidence with the material. As she layers different clay bodies, adheres extruded lengths to pinched forms and throws glaze around, she embraces and extends clay’s volatility. But amongst the disorder the viewer can appreciate small tactile details that lend the intimacy of these slighter works a human element. Even in its final fired state the clay betrays its cooked-ness in speaking of its rawness. The wet clay is pinched between wetter fingers, the extruded tubes are choreographed with elegant force, and the whole thing sags under its saturated weight, only to be captured at the last second in firing. In all the sculptures, the bare fired underbelly of clay is not hidden but celebrated through contrast, a tantalising tactility that nods to clay’s hangover from craft, from the kitchen table: the need of clay to be held in the hand.
The success of these works lies in their near destruction, clay performing on the edge of its capacity. Unlike her large installations, which often continue to change, grow, or deconstruct during the exhibition, either through natural disintegration or visitor participation, Sormin’s smaller sculptures must reach a point where they are finished. Sormin describes arriving at a moment when the sculpture is teetering between construction and collapse, and the physical tension is almost overwhelmed, then she fixes it with fire, to be forever on the brink. Sormin’s ability to push clay further into these realms moves it away from pottery and craft, into chaos and grace. But even while staking its claims on sculpture, it maintains and subverts tropes of ceramic practice.
For clay, a material that carries considerable baggage on its uphill hike into the art world, the weight of colonialism and trade, of domesticity and utilitarianism, of the decorative and craft is thrown off in everything Sormin does and decides for her art. Her ceramics take shape in turbulent histories and gives voice to the difficult complexities of the past and present, and in acknowledgement and acceptance perhaps Sormin’s work offers a step towards healing.
