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.
Linda Rotua Sormin: Uncertain Ground is the culmination of over 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, artist Linda Rotua Sormin has emerged as a leading voice in sculpture with her fearless, monumental structures. Continually pushing clay beyond its limits, Sormin’s web-like forms burst through the boundaries of the medium, literally breaking apart and re-convening in new forms. Colonial artifacts, everyday kitsch, and fragments from the artist’s studio floor dangle and nestle within the latticework.
In her first solo museum exhibition and largest project to date, 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.
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.
