Pressing into Absence

Author

Linda SokFollow

Date of Award

Spring 5-31-2025

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts (MFA)

Department

Sculpture

First Advisor

Lili Chin

Second Advisor

Amalia Galdona Broche

Third Advisor

kathy wu

Abstract

Pressing into Absence traces the materials, processes, and works I have engaged with between March 2023 and May 2025, positioning historical and contemporary narratives in dialogue with one another. This book interweaves colonial-era source materials (from 1864- 1928) - writings, etchings, and paintings of Cambodia produced by persons from the United States of America and France - with personal anecdotes from my travels to Cambodia in 2024. These accounts are layered alongside speculative reflections in the form of text, sketches, mind maps, and material explorations. These archival remnants and personal experiences are folded together and positioned as equally reliable sources.

By collapsing these elements, I seek to trouble the authority of the colonial archive, unsettling the distinctions between fact and fiction. What emerges is not a linear history but a shifting constellation - one that resists the West's narratives of exploration and discovery. Instead, Pressing into Absence embraces slippages between memory, history, and imagination, allowing them to co-author the personal and collective past of a Cambodian-Australian now living in the USA.

The works included in this book are Deities in Temples (2023-2025), Ritual for Return (2023), soft presence, hard absence (2024), palm sugar drip (2024), mineral sweat (2024), and fièvre des bois (2025).

Recommended Citation

Sok, Linda, "Pressing into Absence" (2025). Masters Theses. 1468.
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/masterstheses/1468

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.