with Sara Black, Billy Dee, Miriam Stevens, Donesha Thompson, Caroline Robe, and Lia Rousset

Project Fielding was founded by Sara Black, Billy Dee, Amber Ginsburg, Miriam Stevens and Donesha Thompson and has expanded to involve Caroline Robe and Lia Rousset. We consider building to be a gesture of craft, which by nature is slow, requires commitment, repetition and revision, much like social change. Building has been largely gendered, yet the knowledge, skill and wisdom that can be born of carpentry and craft processes are invaluable to all. Our choice to work with girls, young women and gender variant youth of all ages is born of our experience as women builders in both art and trade contexts. There is a persistent misalignment between the confidence in our capacity to develop building skills and complete large-scale projects and the gender pejorative attitudes we encounter when doing so. Our name, Project Fielding, encompasses both the experience of deflecting unwelcome assumptions and a new direction for the field of building. We propose gender non-conforming building as the vehicle for crafting confidence through physically manipulating materials. This program will accomplish this in two ways: Tooling Camps and Field-Build projects.