TORONTO, Oct. 24, 2025 — The Gardiner Museum proudly presents Linda Rotua Sormin: Uncertain Ground, the artist’s first solo museum exhibition and largest project to date. The culmination of over 20 years of remarkable exploration and innovation, Uncertain Ground opens on November 6, 2025, in conjunction with the reveal of the Gardiner’s transformed ground floor, the Museum’s largest capital project in two decades.
In this ceramics and mixed media installation, Sormin, who was raised in Thailand and Canada, investigates her family’s roots in Indonesia, drawing on Batak mythology to create a richly layered exploration of how life in today’s cosmopolitan city intersects with ancestral memories and the need for spiritual belonging.
Commissioned by the Gardiner Museum, the exhibition brings together clay, sculpture, video, sound, hand-cut watercolour painting, and digital fabrication in a multi-sensory environment where roosters, tigers, dragons, and sacred texts serve as portals into ancient knowledge.
“Linda Rotua Sormin’s fearless, monumental structures have established her as a leading voice in sculpture,” says Dr. Sequoia Miller, Chief Curator & Deputy Director of the Gardiner Museum. “She consistently pushes the medium into new realms of scale, meaning, and material exploration. It’s fitting that her bold and deeply resonant work will debut at the Gardiner as we also mark the reopening of our transformed ground floor, signaling a dynamic new chapter for the Museum.”
In Uncertain Ground, Sormin delves into her lineage among the Batak people of Sumatra in the Indonesian archipelago, weaving a narrative that is both deeply personal and invites visitors to reflect on their own layered experiences. The exhibition tells the story of the artist’s grandmother’s grandfather’s forced conversion from shamanic leader to Christian follower, bringing to life a rich family history of spiritual practices fragmented by colonialism, Christianization, and diaspora.
Sormin researched traditional Batak divination books held in European museum collections with strictly controlled access, as well as the script and spoken language of her ancestors.
“For twenty years, I’ve fed found, broken bits of ceramic into sculptures and installations—my hand-pinched forms have a big appetite for porcelain figurines and other discarded objects,” says Sormin. “Five years ago, I learned that Batak shamans traditionally used pottery from China, Vietnam, and Thailand in their spiritual practices, carving Batak imagery into wooden stoppers that sealed these vessels. Realizing that my impulse to gather and remake is part of an old lineage shifted everything in my work—storytelling started to happen through video, painting, and the voices of my family.”
Exhibition Experience
Sormin’s towering web-like assemblages of raw clay, ceramics, metal, wood, paper, and found objects transform the Gardiner’s Exhibition Hall into an immersive world that is at once awe-inspiring and intimate. Colonial artifacts, everyday kitsch, and fragments from the artist’s studio floor dangle and nestle within the latticework. The low murmur of distant voices envelopes the space.
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.
Linda Rotua Sormin: Uncertain Ground runs from November 6, 2025 to April 12, 2026.
Free Public Celebration
On November 8 and 9, the public is invited to celebrate the reveal of the Gardiner’s transformed ground floor and the opening of Linda Rotua Sormin: Uncertain Ground. All floors of the Museum will be animated by hands-on clay activities, tours, live music, food, dance, and more, including performances by the Indonesian Community of Ontario (ICO) dance ensemble and Indonesian musical group Orkes Garasi.
More information:
https://www.gardinermuseum.on.ca/event/linda-rotua-sormin-uncertain-ground/
More about the artist, Linda Sormin
Born in Bangkok, Thailand, Linda Rotua Sormin moved to Canada with her family at the age of five. Sormin’s sculptures and site-responsive installations embody the vulnerable and fragmentary nature of her diasporic experience.
Recent exhibitions include two large-scale installations in Ceramics in the Expanded Field: Sculpture, Performance and the Possibilities of Clay at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA, (2021-23), and Hokusai: Inspiration and Influence at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA (2023).
Sormin lives and works in New York City. Since the early 2000s, she has established a distinct visual and material language, using raw clay, fired ceramics, found objects, and interactive methods. She integrates writing, video, sound and hand-cut paintings with clay, metal, and wood.
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 Associate Professor of Studio Art and Head of Ceramics.
Sormin’s 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).
ABOUT THE GARDINER MUSEUM
The Gardiner Museum welcomes and inspires audiences of diverse backgrounds, abilities, and experiences through the rich history and storytelling power of clay. It stewards and animates an internationally significant collection of ceramics while centering hands-on learning and making. The Gardiner engages in important cultural conversations taking place in Toronto and beyond through gallery programming and collaborative partnerships. It works to advance Indigenous self-determination and build human connections, creating space for reflection and dialogue.
Founded in 1984 by George and Helen Gardiner, the Museum stewards a permanent collection of over 5,000 objects from Ancestral Abiayala, Europe, Japan, and China, as well as contemporary works with an emphasis on leading Canadian artists.
For more information, please visit: gardinermuseum.com.
lead photo In this ceramics and mixed media installation, Sormin, who was raised in Thailand and Canada, investigates her family’s roots in Indonesia, drawing on Batak mythology to create a richly layered exploration of how life in today’s cosmopolitan city intersects with ancestral memories and the need for spiritual belonging. Photo Credit: David Schmitz
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