Materialnonmaterial
Todd Robinson
Materialnonmaterial
15 June – 14 August, 2026
Thursday 18 June: Exhibition Launch
Thursday 6 August: Slow Looking Workshop
Thursday 13 August: Panel Talk: Art Meets Quantum Science
Todd Robinson, Untitled (whiteboard), 2026, sublimation printed textile (detail). Image courtesy the artist.
Artist Statement
In this project, Robinson explores the relationship between art-making and experimental quantum science, drawing from a period of artist residency with the Quantum Integration Lab at the Sydney Nanoscience Institute.
Over a period of 12 months, Robinson visited the lab to talk, observe, document, and reflect upon scientists and their work. What became evident from these observations was that, while quantum events are described through the conceptual and mathematical frameworks of theoretical physics and materials science, they are produced through entangled material, technical, and social conditions from which they are inseparable.
The laboratory, in this sense, is a socio-material-technical infrastructure composed of instruments, materials, space, their arrangement and relations, but is equally composed of the scientists themselves. Daily acts of observation, adjustment, and improvisation sustain its operation. Knowledge is enacted through embodied practices - shared ways of doing, knowing and feeling. It is a social environment as much as a technical one, in which phenomena that cannot be directly perceived are produced, stabilised, and made legible.
Much like art making, experimental quantum science is experimental, improvisational, and based in materials and technological processes and what they afford. Working from this premise, Robinson developed a series of works in response, encompassing sculpture, sound, and textiles, presented as a sculptural installation.
Cast raw copper sculptures, produced directly from sections of clothing, a long-standing reference point in Robinson’s practice, are suspended within a structure of timber. Imperfections, visible as holes, gaps, and incomplete sections, register the limits and material dynamics of the casting process. Textiles carry inscriptions from lab whiteboards - formulae and calculations jostle with sketched visualizations and diagrams, to-do lists and doodles, revealing the iterative, processual nature and sociality of the lab. A sound work, created from recordings within the laboratory, transposes its technological acoustics into the gallery: the hiss-chug of the dilution fridge, alongside high and low-pitched emissions from various electrical equipment.
Spanning multiple materials, sculptural and perceptual registers, Robinson’s new body of work foregrounds the entangled relations between bodies, technologies, and materials through which fragile, imperceptible phenomena become materially and sensorially felt.
On lab material (2026), soundscape by Timothy Newman
A little-known feature of an experimental lab like ours is their unique soundscape. I spend my days surrounded by the regular whirring and buzzing of vacuum pumps, the click-clack of relays, and the chirps of confirmation or denial from pieces of equipment responding to remote signals — all set against the rhythmic, pulsing backdrop of a pulse tube cooler.
As someone who has spent most of my adult life focusing intently on sound, I’ve been fascinated to note how working in a physics lab has changed my relationship with it. When I first started, I would return home from a long day too tired to listen to new music; exhausted by the acoustic environment I’d inhabited for the last nine or ten hours. As time passed, the sounds of the lab became background noise for thinking: what was once an annoying pulse now feels like a metronome to focus to, a mantra, something to remind me to breathe.
In the Quantum Integration Laboratory (QIL), these quickly became the lowest latency, highest fidelity diagnostic tool that I had access to while running experiments. The simple question “What’s that noise?” was replaced with: “Was that whistling the sound of a pump spinning down? Did this always sound like that, or am I just on the other side of the room to where I normally hear it from?”
This work captures some of the feeling of working in a lab: sounds wax and wane as you walk from setup to setup, as you open and close doors, walk through the service corridors, fill tanks of liquid nitrogen, and experiment. Field recordings taken over the last six months in the QIL and in UNSW’s Fundamental Quantum Technologies Laboratory loop and play against each other, fading in and out, and never quite repeating.
— Timothy Newman
Exhibition Essay
Coppered Scale Layers
Responses to Todd Robinson's Materialnonmaterial
Credits
Artist in the Lab is part of 2024 – 2026 Sydney Nano Arthaus project at the Sydney Social Sciences and Humanities Advanced Research Centre. It is supported by funding through The University of Sydney Nano Institute (Sydney Nano) Catalyst scheme.
Todd Robinson would like to thank and acknowledge the generosity of the research scientists for the many conversations and visits. Thank you to Associate Professor John Bartholomew, Director of the Quantum Integration Laboratory (QIL), for opening the lab for the project, thank you to all the QIL scientists Alice Jeffery, Ben Field, Fergus Ayton, Gargi Tyagi, Angela Liang and Dr. Milos Rancic. A very special thank you to Dr. Tim Newman who was a gracious and generous host, and collaborator on the project. Thank you to Professor Lee Wallace, Director SSSHARC and Professor Alice Motion for the considered conception of the Artist in the Lab project. Also thank you to Dr. Aisha Malik, for her support and facilitation.
Artist Bios
Todd Robinson
Todd Robinson is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in sculpture, often in dialogue with image- making, performance and research. His work is concerned with the relationship between the body, materiality, perception and identity, often using garments, textiles and soft, tactile materials as reference points for sculptural transformation. He is also a Senior Lecturer in Fashion & Textiles, Faculty of Design and Society at the University of Technology Sydney.
Timothy Newman
Timothy Newman is a sound artist and Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Fundamental Quantum Technologies Laboratory. He was previously a PhD researcher at the Quantum Integration Laboratory, University of Sydney.