Monumental Lightness. The Poetics of Urban Space

Janet Echelman’s aesthetic merges seamlessly with public space through her monumental and ethereal sculptures that float above cities around the world. In this exclusive interview with Letra Urbana, the artist shares how she fuses science, architecture, and craftsmanship in works that invite us to rethink the relationship between the body, the environment, and the collective. From her studio in Brookline, Massachusetts, Echelman reflects on her creative process, the power of collaboration, and “radical softness” as both a poetic and political language.

What draws you, personally, to these enormous yet almost weightless forms?

My art is an aspiration of the way I would like to be in the world. I am personally drawn to the quest for lightness and the ability to adapt effortlessly with the winds of change.

How does your creative process begin until your artwork finds its place in the city?

I look all around me for inspiration – at the forms of our world in macro and micro scale, to the patterns of life within it, to the measurement of time, weather patterns, or the paths created by fluid dynamics. I am always in search of inspiration from life. I guess this is my way of making sense of the world, and finding my tiny little moment within the larger unfolding story of humanity on our planet.

Then I turn to the unique site as a guiding force for each artwork. When I make the first site visit, I get a feel for its space and explore its history and texture to understand what it means to its people. I work with my colleagues to brainstorm, sketch, and explore all ideas, without censoring our ideas in the early stages. As the sculpture designs begin to unfold, our studio architects, designers and model-makers collaborate with an external team of aeronautical and structural engineers, computer scientists, lighting designers, landscape architects, and city planners to bring my initial sketches into reality. We fabricate our artworks through a combination of hand splicing and knotting together with industrial looms, and then install on location. It is a gradual, collaborative, and iterative process from every angle, and takes more than a year to go from idea to the final artwork.

You work with advanced materials and technologies, yet the sculptures appear to be handmade. What is the process of weaving them like, and who is involved in bringing these massive pieces to life?

As my projects have increased in scale to skyscrapers and city blocks, I keep encountering terrifying challenges. Collaboration with experts in material science and structural engineering is the way I navigate these immense technical challenges. I also collaborate with lighting designers, landscape architects and architects to achieve the final results in harmony with the site, and experts in all the content topics my art explores, from climate science to genomics to cultural history. Collaboration is the life blood of my joy, and being able to work with so many talented individuals expands the language with which I can speak as an artist. I am always learning from colleagues, and what we create together is definitely greater than what I could create myself.

Many of your works combine data and natural phenomena. What gets you to that intersection between art and science?

I look at the patterns of life and living systems, the measurement of time, weather patterns, the paths created by fluid dynamics or a city’s subway system moving in real time. I am constantly in search of inspiration from human cultural and the ecology of living organisms within our planet. The studio art practice is my way of making sense of the world — finding a tiny little moment within the larger unfolding story of humanity on earth.

What role do you think art should play in urban space? Have you received any comments about how people feel walking around your installations?

It is a scientifically observeable fact that our visual physical context can impact how we feel. Our physical context influences how we experience our lives. The way our cities look and function results from the way people choose to build them, and I believe that collectively we have the power to build them differently. My artwork brings an experience of softness to the scale of the city. It is a counterpoint to the hard edges of buildings. It offers proof that we can interrogate the status quo – that the assumption that cities must be formed from hard materials and straight edges can be changed.

Everyone experiences public artwork differently. My hope is that each person becomes aware of their own sensory experience through engaging with my work. That contemplative moment – that moment of pause – can lead each person to create their own meaning or narrative, so I leave it open-ended.

How do you think your work engages with contemporary environmental or social themes?

Each piece interrogates a different set of questions. For example, the newest work that will premiere in September at the MIT Museum gives visual form to the history of the earth’s climate from the last ice age, and our multiple potential futures.

Have you experienced personal transformation since transitioning from painting and sculpture to working in open spaces and close to the sky?

I am always experiencing personal transformation, and the unfolding of my work is part of that process, just always a few steps ahead of me. One of the most personal works I created was the sculpture Noli Timere, which I created as a way to explore my fears related to love after twenty years of marriage. It depicts two forms against the sky that are independent with breathing space around them, but the colors flow between them without boundaries, and from certain angles it appears as one. After that, we were all shocked when my spouse was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and I was pressed to experience first-hand that fear I had only contemplated earlier.

Photograph by Amy Martz

Your pieces feel powerful and gentle. Do you personally experience that duality along the process?

I am always trying to hold the duality of monumental power with gentle softness. My work gains its power through its softness, because that is what enables its resiliency.  Steel may be strong, but it breaks when a strong wind blows, whereas my braided, knotted, and spliced fibers are supple and able to dance with the wind.

A new book is set to release in September; what ideas or events does it explore?

Radical Softness features mesmerizing color photographs, a foreword by fellow creative Swizz Beatz, and contributions from a diverse range of internationally recognized scholars, engineers, designers, architects, and curators contextualizing the interdisciplinary impact of my work within the fields of global art history, architecture, computation, and landscape architecture. It is a 288-page comprehensive sourcebook that unpacks my practice and ongoing commitment to «Taking Imagination Seriously.»

Are there any places or spaces you dream of transforming but haven’t yet?

Oh so many! The book Radical Softness has a section showing renderings of my designs for Paris which transforms the Louvre into a work titled Marianne’s Breast, referencing the Delacroix painting of Liberty Leading the People.  And my design for the Whitney Museum of Art in New York designed by Renzo Piano, inspired by my conversation with the architects who explained to me the embedded attachment points for sculpture on its outdoor patios.  I’d like to explore all that potential to engage that building as it intersects the public airspace of the High Line.  And so many urban spaces that have the potential to transform through an engagement with public air space, wind, and light.