Ed Pien, Meghan Price & Linda Rotua Sormin: The Carriers

United Contemporary is delighted to present The Carriers, a group exhibition featuring the diverse material practices of Ed Pien, Meghan Price, and Linda Rotua Sormin.

Across these artist’s multi-disciplinary and process-driven works, materials are plucked and scavenged, exploring our interconnective social and material tissue through weaving, embroidery, ink, assemblage, and clay. These materials are not inert. They hold their own agency shaped by time, natural forces, and human interaction. They carry their own life stories, but are also reshaped to offer new narratives.

Meghan Price’s new series of works has emerged through hand-weaving found materials, including strips of fabrics, audio and video tapes, and plastics. Linked to traditional practices of "rag" weaving, these textiles bear the weight of rugs and carry narratives of the Earth's surface—a dynamic membrane where nature and culture, past, present, and future coalesce. Walking, foraging, and botanical ink-making in Södermanland County, Sweden, gave rise to these textiles. Embedded in Price’s woven matrices, is the memory of plants and their liquid colors in motion. Translated through weaving, a second set of scavenged materials construct her ink images, forming aggregates of time, place, process and matter.

Linda Rotua Sormin’s practice is shaped by her Batak Indonesian heritage and the resilience of ancestral culture through periods of intensive rupture, upheaval, and change. While the fine line between survival and fragility is typically captured through her groundbreaking and often large-scale exploration of clay and ceramics, the works in this exhibition take the form of intimate, hand-cut ink drawings on paper and delicate embroideries onto found lace and diaphanous silk. Sormin’s new works also incorporate strands of hair from family members, connecting to the use of hair as a practical material, as well as literally forming threads of direct connection to her family lineage.

The selection of Ed Pien's work in The Carriers bridges his own artistic timespan, featuring current drawings and those dating back to the early days of his practice, alongside brand new assemblages being presented for the first time. Pien's new sculptures take anthropomorphic form, combining hand-built ceramic with found natural materials that bear the sculpted traces of ecological processes. These beings seem to spring from the creatures and landscapes depicted in Pien's ink drawings, inspired by diverse mythological sources, chance, and sustained observations of the natural world.