For 20 years, Linda Sormin has explored fragility, upheaval, migration, survival, and change through ceramic and mixed-media sculptures and site-responsive installations. Her work has always been influenced—at times unwittingly, she says—by her family roots in Thailand, China, and Indonesia. In her distinctive material language, raw clay blends with fired ceramics, found fragments, shards, and objects, writing, video, sound, and hand-drawn images to form shape-shifting configurations of tension and flow. Intricate clay networks generate three-dimensional, linear drawings in space, connecting images and ideas, entwining histories and cultural references. In these gravity-defying, “nomadic” forms, Sormin pushes her medium and traditional ceramic methods to their limits, unfurling a momentum and energy beyond our control.
Jonathan Goodman: You are now based in New York, but you traveled a bit to get there. You were born in Thailand, immigrated to Canada, where you received a diploma in ceramics, and then you studied, and later taught at, Alfred University and Rhode Island School of Design. You now teach studio art at New York University. Has all the jumping around affected the way you make art?
Linda Sormin: Some Indonesians, including my Batak side of the family, follow merantau, a tradition encouraging young people to leave their home village, to make their own place in the world. My parents moved us three times in Bangkok before we went to Canada. I’ve never lived anywhere longer than five years. Uprooting keeps things light and live. . .
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