The Brooklyn Rail

Nature’s kiln, a volcano, spat fire thousands of years ago. With the destructive force of fire dredging and creating islands, Indonesia, the home of the Batak people, was formed. In her first mid-career retrospective solo museum exhibition, Uncertain Ground, Linda Rotua Sormin replicates this cosmology and her family’s stories. While Dr. Sequoia Miller, Chief Curator at the Gardiner Museum, talks about the incomprehensibility of the natural world that appears in the small details of Sormin’s installation, I would venture to describe its irreducible complexity as a portal to the divine creative force. Uncertain Ground reads as a fantasy fiction map at the beginning of a novel, a shoal with washed-up debris and little treasures (i.e., six-pack ring form), or even a visual representation of fire, earth, and water unfurling to make islands.

Five main features organize the exhibition, which comprises approximately 150 unnamed objects of a singular installation: floor-length, illustrated, introductory scrolls that narrativize Sormin’s work on the wall to the right of entry; works jutting out of or hung on walls; the central “raised ground” that the visitor can walk on to view work beside and underneath them; a video projected on a convex-shaped screen; and standalone works directly on the floor that are absorbed in the installation. Wood and metal rods support low-fired abstract lattices (dissecting a traditional coil pot) with found objects, hair of her family members embroidered on fabric, and drippy glaze from the slop bucket of the ceramic studio at New York University. Scattered about are accents of gold leaf, clippings from a watercolor, exacto-knife–cut paper work on the wall, and the dust from works that broke in the process. With all of this propulsion, verbs and physics terms become apropos vernacular, unlocking her meaning.

At the shoreline of the installation, pillows lay against the fabricated structure to facilitate viewing the video projection. The pillow upholstery is a pattern of Leda clay from Ottawa, a thixotropic stone, at 20x magnification to show it at a molecular level. The clay body reappears on the floor just under the custom projection screen and throughout the exhibition. Perhaps this is a gesture to her cultural hybridity: being born in Thailand, coming of age in Canada, and re-connecting with her Indonesian heritage.

Inspired by her 2020 deep dive into her family history, Sormin researched European museum holdings of Batak belongings during her residency at the European Ceramic Work Centre (EKWC) in the Netherlands, spoke with family members to fill in the silence about this heritage of stories that have “steeped too long,” and worked with those fragments to understand the Christianization by way of Dutch colonization that ruptured her family’s legacy and belief system. In her debut poetry volume, published with the exhibition, she describes this archival dissonance as “to learn / from lack” and to work “from minus.” This framework appears in her incorporation of partially understood motifs of seven-point stars and animals found in pustahas (accordion-form divination booklets). These story vessels contain a multitude of mysteries, some benign and others potentially devious. For example, a spell for protection may require killing one’s enemy, a noteworthy juxtaposition of safeguarding and upending.

The hour-long video features recordings of family members speaking in English and Batak while pixelated and even AI-altered imagery of tigers, jungles, and a self-portrait of the artist lying down, captured in porcelain, embody the central story about her great-grandfather, a shaman whose locks were cut off by Dutch missionaries. This story has a few variations: in one, he fell in anguish, and in both, after this assault, he had nightmares.

Sormin began her career studying painting and English, then trained as a formalist potter before discovering her voice through ceramic abstraction. When I interviewed Sormin at the site of her installation, I asked about strength and fragility. Sormin discussed experimenting in the kiln with tangled, extruded lines of varying thickness that challenge the traditional notions of what is fireable in studio ceramics, a debate that persists today. These are the “vulnerable underbelly” of ceramics—installation techniques that make it seem as if a slight bump could knock everything over, along with the repurposed shards. It reflects the brokenness of the world she inhabits, affected by numerous humanitarian crises. This sense of loss is also in Sormin’s investigation of anthropology and museology. “When I go to those museums, I'm opening up those texts, and no one's looked at them,” Sormin says to me when talking about when she first learned of pustahas. “I ask their caretakers [or] curators, who comes, they're like, no one's ever asked to look at these. When I open them, they're literally breaking. I can't do it. They have to do it because it's shedding. There's loss because no one's touched them. If people had been using them all these years, they’d keep their flexibility.”

What sets the exhibition apart is its relationship to space. At first glance, during the VIP Art Toronto preview, the term “horror vacui” came to me. It was one my art history teachers imparted, meaning, “fear of empty space;” it is yet another term to unlearn from the colonizer’s tongue. It’s rooted in Orientalism and neglects to acknowledge those who have to contend with the fragments. Maximalism, then, becomes a necessary framework to find ourselves. Upon my second and third look, the fragments spoke. In the installation, Sormin achieves an irreverence for the object in a traditional museological sense, evident in the ceramic dust and paper cuttings scattered on the floor and gravity-defying suspensions of works that could easily fall if bumped. The use of the objects and the stories contained therein prevail.

Sormin balances legibility and abstraction in her visual language. Tigers, bears, and roosters, made from clay, are recognizable motifs in a mostly abstract installation, as well as spoons, miniature replicas of the terracotta warriors and the like in a cardboard box from the Gardiner’s teaching collection, a Chinese lion puppet, etc. One of the reasons that these pairings exist for the artist is to foster tension. She’s a purist when it comes to her ceramic extractions, which are fused by firing, and no glue is used. Formally, she includes a lot of rectangles with her curlicue forms, perhaps an iconographic call back to the breakable stone tablets that the Ten Commandments were on or even the vitrines that hold objects of cultural heritage, she muses, but she asserts that it comes together intuitively. Among the installation, she includes an easter egg to her past: Linda Sikora’s teapot. This is the artist’s professor. She includes her work to evoke “another kind of legacy [or] ancestor tree.”

Sormin takes the viewer on a journey through multiple complicated feelings, but an important, though often overlooked, emotion is rage. It is the rage and discomfort that comes from prodding the colonial wound. The ceramic shards on the floor around her work came up because Sormin described taking out her rage occasionally on colonial ceramic objects that she’s collected over the years; its detritus has something to offer the space—pointedly in a museum that collects similar figurines. “I want the work to provoke into the quiet space around it. If it's not doing that to me, then it's not enacting what I'm hoping for,” Sormin says. With the rhythm and multidirectionality of the exhibition imbuing it with turmoil, Dr. Miller describes it as “a neuropathway” for the legacy of colonialism without repeating the harm. It’s refreshing to be in a space that pulsates, encloses yet expands, and matches the emotional rollercoaster of wayfinding within the current colonial paradigm.