Janet Echelman sculpts at the scale of buildings and city blocks. Her work defies categorisation, as it intersects disciplinary boundaries, from sculpture, architecture, and urban design, to material science, structural and aeronautical engineering, computer science, and performance. Using unlikely materials, from atomised water particles to engineered fibre fifteen times stronger than steel, Echelman combines ancient craft with computational design software to create large-scale, fluid installations that have become focal points for urban life on five continents.
Curiosity defines Janet’s practice. She began at Harvard College, followed by five years living in a Balinese village and graduate studies in Painting and Psychology. She has taught at MIT, Harvard and Princeton, and her TED Talk, Taking Imagination Seriously, has been viewed more than two million times and translated into 35 languages.
Oprah ranked Echelman’s work #1 on her List of 50 Things That Make You Say Wow!, and she received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award in Visual Arts, honouring “the greatest innovators in America today.”