Fine Arts Rings in 2008 by "Sounding Retreat"

Mixed-media artist Linda Sormin led a legion of WSU students, staff, and faculty in a collaboration that resulted in the triumphant Gallery II exhibit Sounding Retreat. In all, nearly 200 people participated in the community-based ceramics installation hosted by the Department of Fine Arts through their Visiting Artist Series.

Months before Sormin's visit to Pullman, students started to prepare.

Beginning in early November, clay was formed, fired, and glazed in Professor Ann Christenson's ceramics classes. Students made hundreds of unique objects and collected items from home that had personal meaning. It would all become part of the exhibit.

A professor of ceramics at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Sormin was born in Bangkok, Thailand, and grew up in Orillia, Ontario.

She connects to the communities she is working in, combining locally crafted, found, donated, and recycled objects and materials into large, lattice-like ceramic structures that she has shipped to installation sites.

The oversized crates arrived in Pullman over winter break and were loaded in to Gallery II.

On the first day of the winter semester, the marathon installation began, and for the next 9 days approximately 16 dozen volunteers worked with Sormin.

Sormin guided them in constructing the unruly forms that would serve as armatures for the myriad ceramic pieces and found elements created and collected in the fall. In the process, student artists learned about taking risks with their work.

Sormin pushes the boundaries of balance and gravity, and encourages other to do so. That is part of her process as an artist, and sometimes limits are exceeded. It happened during the installation; as finishing touches were being added to a large, freestanding structure, it suddenly collapsed. Everyone in the Fine Arts Building heard the crash.

Admiring the beauty in the chaos of shattered clay and objects, Sormin decided the piece would remain as part of the installation, untouched. Said Sormin, "This work was given the time and space to digest hundreds of objects—random bits of other art—to get a little more airborne than it ever has before, and to fall flat on its face, too."

Sounding Retreat opened to the public on January 16 following a lecture by Sormin in a packed Fine Arts Auditorium, where she talked about herself and the evolution of her artwork.

 

Christenson, who has taught ceramics at WSU since 1990, said, "The energy that her visit produced with the students was just amazing. I think it lasted for the rest of the semester for all of us, and for some of us much longer."

Kevin Haas, associate professor of art and Gallery II coordinator, said, "Linda Sormin seems to have limitless energy that affects everyone around her. Her installation Sounding Retreat was as much about everyone realizing what they can do when they come together to create something as it was about Linda's vision."

For her part, Sormin said about her visit, "Students, faculty, and staff at WSU seemed to pour out of their classrooms, studios, and offices—with a warmth and generosity I've never experienced at this scale! People here took time to build and assemble these forms slowly with me in the kilns and then up in the gallery.… Each person offered their own fresh take on sculpture, their own particular approach to touching material and making things."

Sormin earned her M.F.A. in ceramics at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, New York, and taught at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver, B.C., before joining the faculty at RISD.