Janet Echelman has completed a sculpture in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, as part of the artist’s Earthtime series.
Named Earthtime 1.26 Riyadh, and installed in the city’s Wadi Namar in December 2023 for the Noor Riyadh light art festival, the sculpture “celebrates the interconnection of sky and earth, flexibility and strength, humans and our physical world, bridging opposites with bold colors and soft curves,” according to the artist.
The sculpture is composed of knotted fibers, and designed so that as a single knot moves in the wind, the location of every other knot in the sculpture’s surface is changed in what the artist describes as “an ever-unfolding dance of human-made creation with the forces of nature beyond our control.” The custom-engineered fibers are fifteen times stronger than steel by weight and were knotted and spliced with the help of centuries-old craft techniques.
To design the sculpture, Echelman’s studio used digital modeling that drew on geological data from an earthquake and tsunami in Chile in 2010, which caused ripple effects across the world and sped up the earth’s daily rotation. The sculpture’s title subsequently references the fact that the Earth’s day was shortened by 1.26 microseconds as a result of the event.
“The desert rock landforms at the Wadi Namar site, and the placement of a set of six majlis sofas underneath my artwork to offer comfortable contemplative time for viewers in this desert setting, looking up at the wide open sky and moon was an incredibly unique experience, different from anywhere in the world,” said Echelman about the sculpture.
With the opening of the Riyadh edition, the Earthtime 1.26 sculpture has now been installed in 15 cities around the world, including Denver (2010), Shanghai (2017), and Munich (2022). Last year, meanwhile, the artist unveiled a 229-foot-long floating installation in Columbus, Ohio, titled Current.
As with previous iterations of the piece, design engineering support was provided by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.
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