Janet Echelman: Taking imagination seriously

This story

is about taking imagination seriously.

Fourteen years ago,

I first encountered this ordinary material, fishnet,

used the same way for centuries.

Today, I'm using it to create

permanent, billowing, voluptuous forms

the scale of hard-edged buildings

in cities around the world.

I was an unlikely person to be doing this.

I never studied sculpture,

engineering or architecture.

In fact, after college

I applied to seven art schools

and was rejected by all seven.

I went off on my own to become an artist,

and I painted for 10 years,

when I was offered a Fulbright to India.

Promising to give exhibitions of paintings,

I shipped my paints and arrived in Mahabalipuram.

The deadline for the show arrived --

my paints didn't.

I had to do something.

This fishing village was famous for sculpture.

So I tried bronze casting.

But to make large forms was too heavy and expensive.

I went for a walk on the beach,

watching the fishermen

bundle their nets into mounds on the sand.

I'd seen it every day,

but this time I saw it differently --

a new approach to sculpture,

a way to make volumetric form

without heavy solid materials.

My first satisfying sculpture

was made in collaboration with these fishermen.

It's a self-portrait

titled "Wide Hips."

(Laughter)

We hoisted them on poles to photograph.

I discovered

their soft surfaces

revealed every ripple of wind

in constantly changing patterns.

I was mesmerized.

I continued studying craft traditions

and collaborating with artisans,

next in Lithuania with lace makers.

I liked the fine detail

it gave my work,

but I wanted to make them larger --

to shift from being an object you look at

to something you could get lost in.

Returning to India to work with those fishermen,

we made a net

of a million and a half hand-tied knots --

installed briefly in Madrid.

Thousands of people saw it,

and one of them was the urbanist

Manual Sola-Morales

who was redesigning the waterfront

in Porto, Portugal.

He asked if I could build this

as a permanent piece for the city.

I didn't know if I could do that

and preserve my art.

Durable, engineered, permanent --

those are in opposition

to idiosyncratic, delicate and ephemeral.

For two years, I searched for a fiber

that could survive ultraviolet rays,

salt, air, pollution,

and at the same time remain soft enough

to move fluidly in the wind.

We needed something to hold the net up

out there in the middle of the traffic circle.

So we raised this 45,000-pound steel ring.

We had to engineer it

to move gracefully in an average breeze

and survive in hurricane winds.

But there was no engineering software

to model something porous and moving.

I found a brilliant aeronautical engineer

who designs sails for America's Cup racing yachts

named Peter Heppel.

He helped me tackle the twin challenges

of precise shape

and gentle movement.

I couldn't build this the way I knew

because hand-tied knots

weren't going to withstand a hurricane.

So I developed a relationship

with an industrial fishnet factory,

learned the variables of their machines,

and figured out a way

to make lace with them.

There was no language

to translate this ancient, idiosyncratic handcraft

into something machine operators could produce.

So we had to create one.

Three years and two children later,

we raised this 50,000-square-foot lace net.

It was hard to believe

that what I had imagined

was now built, permanent

and had lost nothing in translation.

(Applause)

This intersection had been bland and anonymous.

Now it had a sense of place.

I walked underneath it

for the first time.

As I watched the wind's choreography unfold,

I felt sheltered

and, at the same time,

connected to limitless sky.

My life was not going to be the same.

I want to create these oases of sculpture

in spaces of cities around the world.

I'm going to share two directions

that are new in my work.

Historic Philadelphia City Hall:

its plaza, I felt, needed a material for sculpture

that was lighter than netting.

So we experimented

with tiny atomized water particles

to create a dry mist

that is shaped by the wind

and in testing, discovered

that it can be shaped by people

who can interact and move through it without getting wet.

I'm using this sculpture material

to trace the paths of subway trains above ground

in real time --

like an X-ray of the city's circulatory system unfolding.

Next challenge,

the Biennial of the Americas in Denver

asked, could I represent

the 35 nations of the Western hemisphere and their interconnectedness

in a sculpture?

(Laughter)

I didn't know where to begin,

but I said yes.

I read about the recent earthquake in Chile

and the tsunami that rippled across

the entire Pacific Ocean.

It shifted the Earth's tectonic plates,

sped up the planet's rotation

and literally shortened the length of the day.

So I contacted NOAA,

and I asked if they'd share their data on the tsunami,

and translated it into this.

Its title: "1.26"

refers to the number of microseconds

that the Earth's day was shortened.

I couldn't build this with a steel ring, the way I knew.

Its shape was too complex now.

So I replaced the metal armature

with a soft, fine mesh

of a fiber 15 times stronger than steel.

The sculpture could now be entirely soft,

which made it so light

it could tie in to existing buildings --

literally becoming part of the fabric of the city.

There was no software

that could extrude these complex net forms

and model them with gravity.

So we had to create it.

Then I got a call from New York City

asking if I could adapt these concepts

to Times Square

or the High Line.

This new soft structural method

enables me to model these

and build these sculptures

at the scale of skyscrapers.

They don't have funding yet,

but I dream now

of bringing these to cities around the world

where they're most needed.

Fourteen years ago,

I searched for beauty

in the traditional things,

in craft forms.

Now I combine them with hi-tech materials and engineering

to create voluptuous, billowing forms

the scale of buildings.

My artistic horizons continue to grow.

I'll leave you with this story.

I got a call from a friend in Phoenix.

An attorney in the office

who'd never been interested in art,

never visited the local art museum,

dragged everyone she could from the building

and got them outside to lie down underneath the sculpture.

There they were in their business suits,

laying in the grass,

noticing the changing patterns of wind

beside people they didn't know,

sharing the rediscovery of wonder.

Thank you.

(Applause)

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

(Applause)