Earthtime 1.26 Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, 2021
DESCRIPTION
Janet Echelman's Earthtime sculpture series heightens our awareness of our interconnectedness with one another and our physical planet.
Earthtime 1.26 Jeddah was installed on the new Art Promenade along the Jeddah waterfront Corniche Between December 2021 and April 2022 as part of a new ambitious creative project by the cultural producer and art collector Swizz Beatz.
The sculpture serves as a symbol of interconnectedness, composed of countless intertwined fibers. Each time a single knot moves in the wind, the location of every other knot in the sculpture’s surface is changed in an ever unfolding dance of human-made creation with the forces of nature beyond our control.
To create the sculptural form, Echelman works with teams both inside and outside her studio. These include architects, designers, and model-makers in the studio, as well as an external team of aeronautical and structural engineers, computer scientists, lighting designers, landscape architects, and a fabrication team.
Inside Echelman’s studio, the physical form of Earthtime 1.26 Jeddah was digitally modeled with inspiration from a scientific data set describing a single geological occurrence -- an earthquake and tsunami in Chile in 2010 -- which caused ripple effects around the globe and even sped up the earth's daily rotation. The number in the title refers to a measurement of time, as the earth’s day was shortened by 1.26 microseconds.
Sculpture fabrication begins with braiding custom engineered fibers which are fifteen times stronger than steel by weight. These custom-colored twines are knotted both by loom and by hand, and every rope is spliced using centuries-old craft techniques. Connecting the past with the present, the artwork takes ancient methods to a new urban scale.
To date, the Earthtime 1.26 sculpture has been installed in 15 cities on 4 continents: Denver, Colorado (2010), Sydney, Australia (2011), Amsterdam, Netherlands (2013), Singapore (2014), Montreal, Canada (2015, 2016, 2017), Prague, Czech Republic (2015), Durham, UK (2015), Santiago, Chile (2016), Shanghai, China (2017), Chiayi, Taiwan (2018), Hong Kong, China (2018), Geneva, Switzerland (2020), Munich, Germany (2021), Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (2021), and Milan, Italy (2022).
MATERIALS AND SIZE
Fiber, Buildings and Sky combined with Colored Lighting. Fibers are braided with nylon and UHMWPE (Ultra high molecular weight polyethylene)
Dimensions of net: 117’ length x 102’ width x 20’ depth
CREDITS
Artist: Janet Echelman
Studio Echelman Project Manager: Melissa Henry
Studio Echelman Design Team: Daniel Smith, Adam Burke
Sculpture Design Engineer: SOM San Francisco: Alessandro Beghini, Nicole Wang
Client: Swizz Beatz / Good Intentions
Curator: Umbereen Inayet
Local Structural Engineer: SELA
Lighting & Installation: Guy Pavelo
Photography: Andrew Williamson, Umbereen Inayet, Guy Pavelo
LOCATION
Jeddah Corniche / Waterfront, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
Press
