Radical Softness: An Artist Talk with Janet Echelman
Join us for a lecture and Q&A with Janet Echelman, the internationally acclaimed artist behind monumental and site-specific fibre sculptures that transform public space. Drawing on engineering and architecture, Echelman will discuss her creative process, the politics and poetics of working at scale, and how her immersive installations invite collective reflection. The talk will be followed by an open Q&A, moderated by the King’s E-Lab.
SPEAKER BIO: Janet Echelman creates experiential sculpture at the scale of buildings that transform with wind and light. The art shifts from being an object you look at, to something you can get lost in. Her work defies categorization as it intersects disciplinary boundaries, from Sculpture, Architecture, and Urban Design to Material Science, Computer Science, Engineering, and Performance. Using unlikely materials from knotted fiber and atomized water particles to choreographed dancers, Echelman combines ancient craft with original computational design software to create artworks that have become focal points for urban life on five continents.
Oprah ranked Echelman’s work #1 on her List of 50 Things That Make You Say Wow!, and she recently received the Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award in Visual Arts, honoring “the greatest innovators in America today.” Recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, Aspen Institute Henry Crown Fellowship, Harvard Loeb Fellowship, and Fulbright Lectureship, Echelman was named an Architectural Digest Innovator for "changing the very essence of urban spaces." Her TED talk "Taking Imagination Seriously" has been translated into 35 languages with more than two million views.
In 2025, Chronicle Books published Radical Softness: The Responsive Art of Janet Echelman, a 288-page visual compendium of Echelman's oeuvre which accompanies a traveling mid-career museum retrospective.
Echelman’s educational path has been nonlinear. After graduating from Harvard College, she lived in a Balinese village for five years, then completed separate graduate programs in painting and then psychology. Tufts University recently awarded her an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts for her public artworks, noting that she never formally studied sculpture or engineering. It was an unexpected loss of her painting materials while on a Fulbright that began her journey from collaborating with fishermen on a beach in India to crafting her monumental fluidly-moving aerial sculptures today, in urban centers from London, Madrid, and Amsterdam, to Shanghai, Singapore, Santiago, and Sydney.
Her permanent commissions have transformed urban environments worldwide, and include Remembering the Future at the MIT Museum (2025), Butterfly Rest Stop in Frisco, TX (2024), Current in Columbus, OH (2023), Bending Arc at the St. Pete Pier in Florida (2020), Earthtime Korea in South Korea (2020), mist sculpture Pulse (2018) in front of Philadelphia City Hall, Dream Catcher (2017) on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, CA, Impatient Optimist (2015) at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, Every Beating Second (2011) at San Francisco International Airport, Her Secret Is Patience (2009) in downtown Phoenix, and She Changes (2005) in Porto, Portugal.
For more information visit www.echelman.com
WHEN: Tuesday, 24th Feb 2026
5.30 PM – 6.30 PM: Lecture and Q&A in Keynes Lecture Theatre
6.30 PM – 7.00 PM: Drinks reception and networking in King’s Bar
WHERE: King’s College, Cambridge
TICKETS: Register here.