Artist Interview: Conversation with Linda Sok

Reincarnations of an altar cloth presents a selection of works from the ongoing series Deities in Temples by Cambodian-Australian artist Linda Sok.

This conversation between Linda Sok and Emily Rolfe, Curator, Contemporary Visual Arts at Campbelltown Arts Centre, took place on 19 March 2026 at Murray Art Museum Albury at the exhibition opening.

Your work takes many forms, including performance, weaving, and installation, but I understand that weaving was new to your practice when you started this body of work in 2023. Can you tell us the story behind this series, Deities in Temples?

My family are from Cambodia, and the Khmer Rouge regime forced their migration from Cambodia to Australia after the war. Every time they would go back to Cambodia, they would bring back silk scarves, and that really pulled my interest into investigating this material that was worn so close to the body and became an anchor for them, to home. Digging further into silk weaving, I realised it was actually an art form that was targeted by the Khmer Rouge. It was erased and the cultural knowledge of weaving in Cambodia disappeared over time. I was lucky in that I met this art historian / curator / friend, who shared with me her research on textiles that had existed in the National Museum in Cambodia but had disappeared over time. The only record of their existence was museum archival cards. Usually, when an object is acquired by a museum, a card is made that records what the object is, what it's made from, the size, the colours, all very basic information. The weavings were documented by French archivists who wrote about what the works looked like, but over time, the actual weavings have disappeared. It's speculated that they disintegrated due to environmental factors, were misplaced, improperly cared for, or purposefully destroyed. So, it’s unknown exactly why they’ve gone missing, but they no longer exist in the collection. I decided to share the descriptions that were on the cards with my family members, and they drew what they thought might have been on the original weavings. From there, I've taken their drawings and have compiled them into this series of weavings that you see here.

Could you tell us a little bit about the practice of pidan and how they were used, when they were being used?

Pidan is a polychromatic weaving technique where you would essentially do Ikat, which is a process in which you spread threads out and tie off certain areas on those threads to create an image. Wherever you've made that tie, would become an area that resists dye. You'd then take those threads, dye them, and then remove the ties. So, it's through a very laborious process where you're able to achieve many colours and very beautiful pictorial elements on them and then you'd weave with those threads. That's what builds this beautiful iconography that's often depicting Buddhist scenes, and would include things like Naga, the snake figure, and Garuda, the bird figure. The word pidan is the name for ceiling in Khmer, and they were usually hung in temple spaces on the ceiling itself, so you'd look up to view them. That's the reason why the show is called Reincarnations of an altar cloth, because they were usually found around altars and have all emerged from the one card, so they’ve grown and become something much more as well.

Your process of making these is quite unique. You've said before that you're not attempting to recreate the lost pidan. Could you explain to us how you make these?

I was thinking about the resistance created through the Ikat process and how I could approximate and pay homage to the practice without just copying what was done before. Pidan and silk weaving is such a sacred art form that I didn't want it to just be an exact copy or to take anything away from Cambodian culture. Even though I am Cambodian, I was born in Australia, so I wanted to create my own language for approaching this practice and honouring it in the ways that I saw fit. The way that I've made these is by still pulling the threads all taut, but I'm screen printing onto threads before weaving with them. I see that as a similar technique to the way that Ikat operates in that wherever you've got the block in the silkscreen, it allows that area to resist dye to create the imagery. Then I paint into the screen print as well. So, there's many applications of screen printing, painting and finally weaving. I’m able to shift how much pigment comes through on the weavings, depending on how much I paint into it and how much I'm able to turn the threads, because when you're working on the loom you can adjust how the thread sits, and that shapes how clear an image is. There's a lot of techniques that I've developed over time, simply from sitting on the loom and experimenting.

You've let us in on some of the happy accidents that have occurred while you've been making these works. This includes the misaligned images or the gaps in some of the works. These ‘errors’ align conceptually with the works, and they represent translation, mistranslation, the sharing of knowledge. Can you tell us about some of these discoveries?

In the third piece in the series, you can see the image is much clearer, much easier to understand while in the second piece you can see the image is sort of broken. That's because I messed up the order of the bobbins. In weaving, you're essentially swapping out bobbins and loading up different threads. I accidentally mixed up one of the bobbins, and so the image flipped on itself. I was like, you know what? I'm just going to lean into this mistake and see where it takes me. It was really great to embrace mistakes that happened along the way. It grounded the pieces and helped me to think through all these ideas around memory, which is so important to the work. There's this colonial history as well, because the records were made by French archivists, so the mistakes were a way of collapsing the narrative around that archive as a solid truth. In the ninth piece in the series, the image is quite muted, and the colours are sort of bleeding. That's because when I'd made that piece, I didn't have the proper steaming equipment. So instead, I rolled it up in a little food steamer and steamed it on my stovetop. The outcome was that the dye bled through all the creases, and some of the threads accidentally dipped into the water, which meant water flooded the image, but it made for a much more cohesive piece. I really enjoy it when a material pushes back. I like to embrace it as very much a part of the process. Otherwise, it's not as fun.

You've previously referred to the idea of vibrations in your work, referring to how your own identity is constantly shifting and in a state of becoming. I see this as being linked to the iterative nature of the works in this series. Can you tell us what it means to you to be working in a series, but to continue working with the same source material?

It’s linked to the material itself, the subtle vibration of the threads sitting against each other, rubbing and shifting slightly, so the clarity isn't quite there. That’s something that speaks to ideas around the echo or, the copy of a copy of a copy, where something continues to emerge, then fall away and come back. Those echoes continue to reverberate in knowledge passed down through generations. Weaving and silk weaving knowledge is usually passed down matrilineally, so I think of the echoes down that line particularly. Similarly, I think of how the past works I've made inform future work. So there's constant shift and movement away down the line where, like I mentioned, the third piece in the series is the clearest, but then the most recent piece is the one with the purple down the middle that has the most vibrations and the most breaks, and patchwork as well over the top.

That relates to what I wanted to ask you in relation to decolonial practices. You identify that as a key part of your work. Can you speak to that a little bit?

There is a long history of colonisation by the French in Cambodia, they only left just before the war. When I went back to Cambodia two years ago, I tried to go to the museum to see the archive registration cards in person and it was so difficult to do because all the documents, the catalogs and the systems were all in French. So, there's this interesting dynamic where I am a Cambodian person trying to come in and access parts of my culture, but not quite able to because of these systems in place that don't allow me to. It’s still required that all the people that are working in the museum also speak French because it's the language of the institution. So, the colonial influences in Cambodia have just continued all the way up until now. For me, it was important that [access to] those cards go back to other Cambodian people. My family are the most immediate connection to Cambodia that I have, and many members of my family contributed their interpretation, whereas the cards were written by only two French archivists. So, it felt like spreading out the power that the archive holds and pulling on lots of different knowledge from different people to think about the ways that the weavings were described. For example, [in the work] I have imagery of a central tree figure that wasn't actually described in the registration cards at all. There's no mention of a tree, but my parents decided to draw it, and it's become a central part of a lot of the weavings. Then when I went to Cambodia, I saw a lot of weavings with that sort of tree-figure with the Buddha sitting underneath it. It's interesting to think that perhaps it was just a perspective placed on the weavings like, ‘oh, this tree isn't important to include’, so it was left out. There's no way of verifying how accurate any of these recreations are. That’s something that I really enjoy, that you can't quite say ‘yes, this is a form of truth.’ Maybe the archivists documented it to the best of their ability, but I think about language and what it’s able to hold. Red is described in the cards, but everyone's interpretations of red aren't exactly the same, and languages denote colours differently too. So, I've worked to shift the colors throughout; the reds also merge into purples and oranges. There's always this kind of muddy interpretation which helps to destabilise the idea of a solid truth.

Reincarnations of an altar cloth is a Campbelltown Arts Centre exhibition presented in partnership with Murray Art Museum Albury. The exhibition includes new work commissioned by Campbelltown Arts Centre that expands the visual narrative of the ongoing series.

This conversation was edited for brevity. MAMA has made all efforts to preserve the voices of those involved. All images by Jeremy Weihrauch.