The Gardiner Museum’s fully transformed ground floor has just reopened, with a new Gallery of Indigenous Ceramics and a monumental solo exhibition from New York-based sculptor Linda Rotua Sormin.
The $15.5-million renovation is the museum’s most ambitious capital project in two decades, and it reimagines what a ceramics institution can be in 2025 and beyond.
The reimagined 9,000-square-foot ground floor, designed by Montgomery Sisam Architects and Andrew Jones Design in collaboration with architect Chris Cornelius (studio:indigenous), weaves together new Collection Galleries, a fully equipped Makerspace, and a Community Learning Centre, placing community programming at the core of the museum.
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Visitors will encounter the transformation as soon as they enter! Here are a few highlights to look out for:
- The Gardiner’s first-ever Gallery of Indigenous Ceramics, curated by Franchesca Hebert-Spence (Anishinaabe, Sagkeeng First Nation) in collaboration with Cornelius’s architectural installation yelákhwaˀ (container-“one uses it to be in”), focuses on living Indigenous ceramic traditions from the Great Lakes and beyond
- A major new commission by Algonquin artist Nadia Myre (Kitigan Zibi Anishinaabeg) anchors the ground floor: an installation built from handmade ceramic beads and clay pipe stems gathered along London’s River Thames. Myre’s palette is a nod to the Canadian Shield. The project lands alongside news of a $9 million gift from the Radlett Foundation, which helped fund the transformation.
- The museum’s headliner: Linda Rotua Sormin: Uncertain Ground (runs Nov 6, 2025-April 12, 2026). This is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition and her largest project to date! The multi-level installation blends clay, video, sound, and objects into a dense, web-like environment where roosters, tigers, and dragons flicker through a thicket of ceramic fragments. The project delves into Rotua’s Batak ancestry in Indonesia, exploring diaspora and belonging.
“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,” Sormin said in a statement. “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.”
The Gardiner Museum is located at 111 Queens Park. Head over Nov 8-9, 2025, for the free celebration weekend! The whole museum will come to life with hands-on clay activities, tours, live music, food, dance and more. Check out this weekend’s schedule or download the full event program.
