Janet Echelman, whose billowy works of structural art have risen over Vancouver and dozens of other cities worldwide, has installed her first sculpture to be suspended over a street, in Columbus, Ohio.
Built with an engineered fiber 15 times stronger than steel by weight, the 229-foot-long soft fiber sculpture was made with 78 miles of twine and intricately handwoven into more than 500,000 knots.
The monumental sculpture floats above a major downtown intersection, suspended 126 feet in the air at its highest point. Titled Current , it was created as a seasonal work with a period of hibernation each winter when the sculpture is deinstalled to avoid ice accumulation, followed by a celebratory reinstallation each spring.
Renowned for creating colossal sculptures at the intersection of art, architecture, urban design, science and engineering, Echelman sculpts at the scale of buildings and city blocks. She leads a global design team of aeronautical and mechanical engineers, lighting designers, computer scientists, landscape architects and fabricators. Her studio designs projects according to the climate and intended lifespan for each site and context.
Echelman has created more than 50 installations that have become focal points for urban life on five continents, from Singapore, Sydney, Shanghai and Santiago to New York and London. Her permanent art commissions draw millions of annual visitors in California, Washington, Oregon, Arizona, North Carolina, Florida, and Oporto (Portugal).
See her work in Vancouver on a previous Art Junkie post here.
Janet Echelman’s website, here.
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