Research, Outreach, and Funding / Research Through Making Grant

Project Title

Dirty Work

Project Team

Neal Robinson
with Julie Simpson, William Liow, Abigail Murray

Starting from ground and working skyward, Dirty Work takes up colloquial earth as both building material and recalibrated "promised land." Kaolin, a dense, white, hard-working mineral, becomes host to the architectural inquiry in which the perceptual alignment of dirt with mass, density, dankness, and mute weight is challenged in favor of the light, thin, and fleshy. To make manifest these questions, we worked dirty. That is, with tacitly informed understanding, relative tolerance, and literal material slip as assets to discovery instead of a more exacting, clean and arguably remote conceptual practice. Giving figure to form in this way – with surface, line and dimension – produces a material anxiety that squares us between informed hunch and all-out faith.

We dig it.

Special thanks and acknowledgments to

John Leyland and the Quilting Bees of Taubman College