TED Talk Tuesday: Taking Imagination Seriously

Janet Echelman takes imagination seriously. For years she’s matched her artistic vision with technical innovation, offering the world new ideas for public art.

As an artist, Echelman has always sought to defy categorization. She creates experiential sculptures at the scale of buildings that transform with wind and light. Using unlikely materials from fishnet to atomized water particles, Echelman combines ancient craft with cutting-edge technology to create artworks that have become focal points for urban life on four continents.

Fourteen years ago, Echelman traveled to a fishing village famous for sculpture. While walking on the beach one day, she watched as men bundled their nets into mounds on the sand. She had seen that very same sight every day, but this time she saw it differently—it was a new approach to sculpture, a way to make volumetric, billowing, voluptuous art. That moment sparked a fire inside Echelman. She realized that the world of art is limitless, as long as you dare to open your mind and imagine.

Her first satisfying sculpture was made in collaboration with these fishermen. It was a self-portrait titled “Wide Hips.”

“We hoisted these fishnets on poles to photograph. I discovered their soft surfaces revealed every ripple of wind in constantly changing patterns. I was mesmerized,” Echelman said in her TED Talk, “Taking Imagination Seriously.” “I became lost in this idea that you could take an object and shift it from being something you simply look at, to something you could get lost in.”

This experience paved the way for the rest of Echelman’s career. Her most recent prominent works include “Her Secret is Patience,” which spans two city blocks in downtown Phoenix, “Water Sky Garden,” which premiered for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, and “She Changes,” which transformed a waterfront plaza in Porto, Portugal.