Janet Echelman's Earthtime sculpture series heightens our awareness of our interconnectedness with one another and our physical planet. Earthtime 1.26 Jeddah is installed on the new Art Promenade along the Jeddah waterfront Corniche through April 2022 and is 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. Courtesy of Studio Echelman.
