Earthtime 1.26 Wadi Namar, Saudi Arabia, 2023
DESCRIPTION
Janet Echelman's Earthtime sculpture series heightens our awareness of our interconnectedness with one another and our physical planet.
Earthtime 1.26 Wadi Namar was 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.
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 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.
“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.” - Janet Echelman
To date, the Earthtime 1.26 sculpture has been installed in 16 cities on 5 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), Milan, Italy (2022), and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (2023).
MATERIALS AND SIZE
Fiber, Buildings and Sky combined with Colored Lighting, and Arabic Majlis Sofas. 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 Team: Melissa Henry, Daniel Smith
Sculpture Design Engineer: SOM San Francisco: Alessandro Beghini, Nicole Wang
Client: Presented by the Royal Commission for City
Production Management: HAVAS Paris
Photography: Janet Echelman
LOCATION
Wadi Namar, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia