Stream

MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts, USA
October 6, 2021 — April 9, 2023

MASS MoCA — Ceramics in the Expanded Field,curated by Susan Cross
Linda Sormin interview at MASS MoCA
Mixed media installation — raw clay, ceramic, hand-cut paper, sound, video monitors, metal, wood
Dimensions variable

Stream installed as part of the MASS MoCA exhibition, Ceramics in the Expanded Field (2021-2023)

Interview at MASS MoCA

Working with a deep interest in clay, paper, and other raw materials, I explore fragility and change, vulnerability and resilience, chance and survival. My questions take shape through abstract shapes flowing through architecture. Recording voices and layering stories of my family’s and my own diasporic experiences into videos I took while wading and submerged in two streams (in western New York and in Sumatra, Indonesia, where my father’s family originates), I work to decolonize museum spaces through pluralistic approaches and hands-on presence.

I combine hand-built structures with metal armatures and discarded objects. In this installation, a tattered Chinese lion dance puppet brought by a US soldier from China to upstate New York, and a metal spiral staircase I found in a local metal scrap yard are in conversation with forms that I made and upturned, showing the vulnerable underbelly of ceramic forms.

Murray Whyte, Boston Globe

“At MASS MoCA, 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.”