Todd Robinson
Materialnonmaterial
15 June – 14 August, 2026
Thursday 18 June: Exhibition Launch
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 propositional, 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, are suspended within a structure of timber, filtered by fine copper mesh. 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.
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 to Dr. Aisha Malik, for her support and facilitation.
Artist Bio
Todd Robinson is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans sculpture, textiles, photography, video, and research. His work examines the entangled relationships between bodies, materials, technologies, and perception through tactile and materially transformative processes. Often working with garments, textiles, and industrial materials, Robinson explores how sensory, social, and technical conditions shape experience and meaning.
His projects are frequently developed through research-led methodologies, engaging sites of material, cultural, and scientific production. Robinson has presented solo and group exhibitions and collaborative projects across Australia, China, Europe, and the United States. His work is held in the public collections of Ipswich Art Gallery, Queensland; the National Gallery of Victoria; ARTBANK; and Woollahra Council, Sydney. He has published in international fashion research journals including Fashion Theory, The International Journal of Fashion Studies, and Fashion Practice, and is a researcher with the UTS Imagining Fashion Futures Lab. He lives and works on Gadigal land in Sydney, Australia.