Linda Sormin | |
---|---|
Born | 1971 Bangkok, Thailand |
Known for | Artist, educator |
Style | Ceramics, mixed-media, installation art |
Website | lindasormin |
Linda Sormin (born 1971, Bangkok, Thailand) [1] is a Canadian artist known for her ceramics and installations. As a young child Sormin immigrated from Thailand to Canada. [2] She attended Andrews University, Sheridan College, and Alfred University. She teaches at New York University. [3]
In 2011 her work was included in the exhibition Overthrown: Clay Without Limits at the Denver Art Museum. [4] In 2013 she was selected one of the 5 participants in the RBC (Royal Bank of Canada) Emerging Artist People’s Choice Award competition held at the Gardiner Museum. [5] In 2018, she held a solo exhibition entitled Fierce Passengers at the Carleton University Art Gallery. [6] In 2021 Sormin was included in the exhibition No Boundaries: Contemporary Canadian Ceramics at Messum's London and Wiltshire locations. [7] The same year, she mounted a site-specific, monumental installation entitled Stream for Ceramics in the Expanded Field at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. [8] She also created a site-specific, multimedia installation for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 2023.
Her work is in the collection of the Gardiner Museum [2] and the Victoria and Albert Museum. [9] Her piece, Ta Saparot (pineapple eyes), was acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum as part of the Renwick Gallery's 50th Anniversary Campaign. [10] [11]
In her non-linear, ambiguous, and generative work, Linda Sormin explores the charged lives of her materials. Assembling her sculptures from discarded objects, textural ceramics, and flickering gold leaf, the artist sees her art on a continuum with that of her Indonesian and Chinese-Thai ancestors. One of Sormin's gallerists describes her work in the following terms:
"Linda Sormin’s sculptures are a journey through personal archeology. Her open-ended ceramics enfold many voices and labors, from the donated memorabilia of friends and strangers in distant places, to the hands of those assisting, to the dumpster diving, searching for the discarded. The complex membranes of pinched clay provide a porous conduit bridging and breaking bonds, entwining stories and histories among those who define themselves through their separations." [12]
Migratory, oceanic, and fluctuating, Sormin’s multi-media treatment of the Asian diasporic experience is fragmented and sutured, but expansive. Sormin brings disparate stories and unexpected forms into conversation with one another through creative alignments and misalignments. In his review of Ceramics in the Expanded Field, Murray Whyte wrote:
"Linda Sormin’s tangle of jagged sheet metal, video screens, iron pipe and vibrant clay and ceramic forms make a good case; it’s a chaotic amalgam of material and form so ragged and violent it looks like the aftermath of a natural disaster. I like what it’s saying: Tear it down, start again. The rules have changed." [13]
Janet Koplos reviewed the same exhibition in Art in America, and noted the scale and accumulative nature of Sormin's installation:
"The most impressive work in the show is Linda Sormin’s gargantuan agglomeration of tangled clay tubes, numerous video screens of varying size, a section of a spiral staircase, a dragon head used in Chinese festival dances, and detritus, arcing through the air within and around a zigzag metal framework. Though static, the form suggests exuberant motion, like a whiplashing fire hose. The creation might seem at first apocalyptic, a triumph of disorder; to the contrary, its title, Stream (2020–21), highlights the video images of flowing water and abstract patterns as well as the sculpture’s overall fluid aerial configuration, recalling the acrobatics of flying dragons in Chinese myth and art." [14]
Dame Elisabeth Jean Frink was an English sculptor and printmaker. Her Times obituary noted the three essential themes in her work as "the nature of Man; the 'horseness' of horses; and the divine in human form".
Toshiko Takaezu was an American ceramic artist, painter, sculptor, and educator with an oeuvre spanning a wide range of mediums, including ceramics, weavings, bronzes, and paintings. She is noted for her pioneer work in ceramics and has played an important role in the international revival of interest in the ceramic arts. Takaezu was known for her rounded, closed ceramic forms which broke from traditions of clay as a medium for functional objects to explore its potential for aesthetic expression, taking on Abstract Expressionist concepts and placing her work in the realm of postwar abstractionism. She is of Japanese descent and from Pepeeko, Hawaii.
Elizabeth Woodman was an American ceramic artist.
Adrian Saxe is an American ceramic artist who was born in Glendale, California in 1943. He lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
Beth Cavener, also known as Beth Cavener Stichter, is an American artist based out of Montana. A classically trained sculptor, her process involves building complex metal armatures to support massive amounts of clay. Cavener is best known for her fantastical animal figures, which embody the complexity of human emotion and behavior.
Shary Boyle D.F.A. is a contemporary Canadian visual artist working in the mediums of sculpture, drawing, painting and performance art. She lives and works in Toronto.
Viola Frey was an American artist working in sculpture, painting and drawing, and professor emerita at California College of the Arts. She lived and worked in the San Francisco Bay Area and was renowned for her larger-than-life, colorfully glazed clay sculptures of men and women, which expanded the traditional boundaries of ceramic sculpture.
Cristina Córdova is an American-born, Puerto Rican sculptor who works and lives in Penland, North Carolina.
Kirsten Lillian Abrahamson is a Canadian ceramic artist.
Grace Nickel is a Canadian ceramic artist and art instructor in post-secondary education.
Margaret A Boozer is an American ceramist and sculpture artist, best known for her clay and ceramic compositions, or landscapes, that focus on the individuality, history, and geology of the clay used as subject matters.
Marja Vallila was an American artist, painter, ceramicist and sculptor.
Clare Twomey is a London-based visual artist and researcher, working in performance, serial production, and site-specific installation.
Linda Threadgill is an American artist whose primary emphasis is metalsmithing. Her metal work is inspired by forms of nature and the interpretations she gleans from the intricate patterns it presents. She explores the foundation of nature to allude to nature and transform it into re-imagined, stylized plants forms.
Donald Lester Reitz was an American ceramic artist, recognized for inspiring a reemergence of salt glaze pottery in United States. He was a teacher of ceramic art at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1962 until 1988. During this period, he adapted the pottery firing technique developed in the Middle Ages, which involved pouring salt into the pottery kiln during the firing stage. The method was taught in European ceramic art schools, but largely unknown in United States studio pottery.
Susan Collett RCA IAC is a Canadian artist in printmaking and ceramics. In 1986, she graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Art, earning a B.F.A. in printmaking with a minor in ceramics.
Kukuli Velarde is a Peruvian artist based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She specializes in painting and ceramic sculptures made out of clay and terra-cotta. Velarde focuses on the themes of gender and the repercussions of colonization on Latin American history, with a particular interest in Peru. Her ceramics consist of unusual body positions, childlike faces, and works that have been molded from her own face as well.
Nancy Selvin is an American sculptor, recognized for ceramic works and tableaux that explore the vessel form and balance an interplay of materials, minimal forms, and expressive processes. She emerged in the late 1960s among a "second generation" of Bay Area ceramic artists who followed the California Clay Movement and continued to challenge ceramic traditions involving expression, form and function, and an art-world that placed the medium outside its established hierarchy. Her work has been exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Denver Art Museum, Daum Museum of Contemporary Art and Kohler Arts Center, and belongs to the public art collections of LACMA, the Smithsonian Institution, Oakland Museum of California, and Crocker Art Museum, among others. Critic David Roth has written, "Selvin's position in the top rank of ceramic artists has come through a process of rigorous self-examination … what differentiates [her] is that she eschews realism and functionality, indicating a level of intellectual engagement not always found among ceramicists." Writer and curator Jo Lauria described Selvin's tableaux as "elegiac and stylistically unified" works that serve as "forceful essays on the relationship between realism and abstraction, object and subject, decoration and use." Selvin lives and works in the Berkeley, California area.
Gyöngy Laky is an American sculptor living and working in San Francisco, California. Her work has been exhibited in the U.S., Europe, Asia and South America. She gained recognition early in her career for her linear sculptures constructed in the architectural methods of textile arts. “Laky’s art manifests architectonic sensibility. She is as much an engineer as she is an artist in the conventional sense.” She is also known for her site-specific, outdoor, temporary installations.
Sandy Brown is a British ceramics artist who is nationally and internationally known for her works, which range from smaller ceramics to huge public sculptures. Brown is a Fellow of the Craft Potters Association.