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Artist Biography American artist Janet Echelman reshapes urban airspace with monumental, fluidly moving sculpture that responds to environmental forces including wind, water, and sunlight. This year she premiered Water Sky Garden at the Vancouver Olympic Winter Games, and she completed 2009’s largest US public art commission, Her Secret is Patience, a new civic icon for Phoenix that has been hailed for contributing to the revitalization of its downtown. Echelman’s 160-foot-tall waterfront She Changes in Portugal was called “one of the truly significant public artworks in recent years” by Sculpture Magazine. Her art has been presented in Spain, Italy, Portugal, Lithuania, India, Japan, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Canada, Mexico, and the US. She graduated from Harvard College and completed graduate degrees in psychology and painting, yet is an autodidact in sculpture.
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Artist Statement
“…the search for lightness is a reaction to the weight of living.”
– Italo Calvino
My sculpture thrives in the context of the city, interacting with people in the course of their daily lives. These monumental netted sculptural environments move through time, animated by an ever-changing “wind choreography,” making invisible air currents suddenly visible to the human eye. I make living, breathing pieces that respond to the forces of nature — wind, light, water.
Within those parameters, I spent the last decade developing a method for creating public sculpture that utilizes a rigid steel armature system combined with flexible volumetric forms made of knotted high-technology fiber. These are engineered to specific climates in terms of their ability to withstand directional wind velocity and snow-loads. I liken this method to the design of life forms, where a skeleton holds up a three-dimensional form draped with skin or membrane. I sometimes think of these monumental forms as parts of an imaginary fossil record, where something out of time suddenly appears out of scale and out of context in our current environment. Some two decades ago, while studying evolutionary biology at Harvard College with Stephen Jay Gould, I studied the fossil record to reveal the variety of forms created, and the ways surface area was maximized in a group of one-cell-thick life forms from the Pre-Cambrian era.
In 2005, I completed a voluminous net sculpture on the coast of Portugal, She Changes, a 100-meter diameter hollow form that suspends above a three-lane highway roundabout that moves in the wind. The mayor has made the sculpture the city’s symbol. When interviewed, local people give different interpretations of the work, from fishing nets, ships and masts of the Portuguese maritime history, the red- and white- striped smokestacks of the area's industrial past, to Portuguese lace, sea creatures, and ripples in water.
For each project, I research the site, its geography, its physical, cultural, and political history. My goal is to create work with which residents can form a relationship, and which can embody local identity. I pay close attention to local materials and working methods, and the ways these methods have adapted through the centuries.
Studio Info
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