Trina Michelle Robinson is an artist from Oak Park, Illinois who is currently working in San Francisco. Her art originates from from personal and historical archives, reflecting on her own ancestry to create immersive and deeply personal spatial encounters that materialize the complexity of emotions and layered geographies of Black migration. Her works often begin by tracing the steps of her ancestors, gathering materials from their homes and homelands, using this tactile act as a means to connect with them and gather their fractured and lost memories. In particular, she often collects dirt from these sites of personal significance, transforming that earth into a charged object within her compositions. Her installations are undefinable, hovering somewhere between an altar, a model, or a garden; a collection of objects that become spatial poetry. Trina received her MFA from California College of the Arts in 2022.
Her work Open Your Eyes to Water was exhibited in San Francisco at the 500 Cap Street Foundation and at Root Division from February-May 2026. The work is an expanded version of her previous installation titled Elegy for Nancy (2022) – a tender tribute to her oldest known ancestor, a woman named Nancy who was born in 1770s Kentucky, then still part of Virginia. Open Your Eyes to Water is a living installation tracing her years-long cross-continental engagement with family lineage and movement from Senegal, to Kentucky, Chicago, and California.
The Installation merges with the atmosphere of the gallery, charging the space with a melancholic yet restorative energy. At the center, a rammed earth block holds the room with a potent presence, atop which sits a reproduction of a will from the previous owner of her enslaved ancestors, written with handmade ink (a mixture of soil collected from Senegal and charred cedar charcoal) on paper she fabricated from cotton picked at a farm her ancestor used to be enslaved at in Oklahoma. Every mention of her ancestor’s enslavement has been redacted with sewn lines of sisal thread from Zimbabwe, reclaiming this history for herself, freeing her ancestors, speaking for them in the present moment.
The rammed earth block is composed from various soil samples from significant places tracing her family history through time and space, compressed together into a unified block, supporting a document of their liberation. The block sits in an analogous landscape of dirt and grass plumes, harkening to the various landscapes natural, agricultural, and urban landscapes her ancestors have traversed across the world.
Location: Diriyah, Saudi Arabia
From This Earth Installation is a temporary installation by Karim+Elias in Diriyah, Saudi Arabia. Completed in 2024, the 220 m² project was presented as part of Layali Diriyah and consists of a series of porous earthen screens assembled from more than 1,400 hand-sculpted spheres. Rather than treating earth as a heavy and continuous wall, the installation reimagines it as a modular, open-air spatial filter. In this sense, the project is significant not only as an installation, but also as a contemporary experiment in earthen material practice.
The project is deeply tied to its location. Diriyah is described by its official destination platform as the “City of Earth,” and it is presented as the birthplace of Saudi Arabia. Within this context, From This Earth operates as more than a temporary pavilion: it becomes a material response to a place historically associated with earthen building traditions. The architects state that the work celebrates Diriyah’s craft of building with earth, so the project should be understood as a contemporary reinterpretation of local architectural memory rather than as an abstract sculptural object placed in a neutral site.
Karim+Elias describe their broader practice as a contemporary exploration of “sculpting with sand,” using locally sourced earth, clay, and water in custom-made moulds. In From This Earth, this material approach appears through a system of over 1,400 hand-sculpted modular spheres made from local material and stacked into earthen screens. This construction logic is important because it shifts earth away from its more familiar role as a monolithic mass or thick wall. Here, earth becomes a repeated unit, a surface condition, and a space-making device. The project therefore demonstrates how traditional earth-based craft can be translated into a contemporary modular language.
The installation’s spatial effect comes from porosity. The stacked spherical modules create filtered views, partial enclosure, and changing patterns of light and shadow. Designlab Experience describes the screens as evoking the traditional mashrabiya and recalling Diriyah’s vernacular triangular wind openings and rooftop silhouettes. Because of this, the project does not simply represent earthen architecture visually; it performs some of its environmental and perceptual qualities. Air, light, depth, and visibility are mediated through the earthen surface, allowing visitors to experience earth not only as a material, but also as an atmospheric interface.
This project is relevant to contemporary earthen architecture because it expands the definition of what an earthen work can be. It does not reproduce a traditional mud structure directly, nor does it use earth only for symbolic effect. Instead, it repositions earthen craft within a temporary cultural installation and demonstrates that earth can function as a contemporary design medium. From This Earth shows that earthen practice today can move across architecture, installation, art, and public event design while still remaining grounded in local material and cultural context.
