Linda Sormin FLAMES 🔥 at the Gardiner Museum!
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“LINDA ROTUA SORMIN: UNCERTAIN GROUND”
Gardiner Museum, Toronto, Canada
November 2025 – April 12, 2026
“The low murmur of distant voices surrounds you. The image of a tiger flickers across a door. A rooster peeks through a ceramic thicket. A sinuous dragon swirls overhead.
In her first solo museum exhibition and largest project to date, Linda Sormin delves into her lineage among the Batak people of Sumatra in the Indonesian archipelago, exploring how images and ideas of her ancestors have, sometimes unwittingly, infused her artistic practice. She studied traditional Batak divination books, available to her only in European museum collections, with access strictly controlled, as well as the script and spoken language of her ancestors. Building on her research, Sormin weaves a rich family history of shamanic and other spiritual practices fragmented by colonialism, Christianization, and diaspora.
“Linda Rotua Sormin: Uncertain Ground” is the culmination of 20+ years of remarkable exploration and innovation, bringing together clay, sculpture, video, sound, hand-cut watercolour painting, and digital fabrication in a multi-sensory environment that asks how life in the modern, cosmopolitan city can coexist with memories and experiences of our ancestral traditions.
Raised in Canada and Thailand, Sormin has emerged as a leading voice in sculpture with her fearless, monumental structures. 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.
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”.
Born in Bangkok, Thailand, Linda Rotua Sormin moved to Canada with her family at the age of five. Her sculptures and site-responsive installations embody the vulnerable and fragmentary nature of her diasporic experience. Since the early 2000s, she has established a distinct visual and material language, using raw clay, fired ceramics, found objects, and interactive methods.
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 Professor of Studio Art and Head of Ceramics.
Her work is included in private and public collections including the permanent collections of the Gardiner Museum (Toronto, ON, Canada), Museum of Fine Arts Boston (Boston, MA, USA), Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, DC, USA), and Victoria & Albert Museum (London, UK).