Joan Brigham is an artist whose work unleashes the mystical and powerful aspects of steam in the environment. She has collaborated on public art and performances, and created a genre of water and steam propelled glass sculptures drawing on the ancient concept of aeolipiles.

“Steam is accepted as an invisible utility of the man-made city, operating below-grade under strict requirements as to pressure and flow rate. It heats buildings and the food we cook and the water in which we bathe. To me it is a genie let out of its bottle, or rather pipe, to meld the competing varieties of visual information we are given into a dream-world of suffused color. This is a second role for steam, being an element of art rather than serving practical necessities; water has long been celebrated in fountains; it is time for steam.”
— Joan Brigham
“Steam requires a re-examination of its presence in the city—either as a visible work-site for the city maintenance crews or as a temporary art work to celebrate some season or event which has popular meaning for its inhabitants involves a consideration of structure. As an immaterial element in a very material environment, the presence of steam vitally connects the residents, workers, shoppers to the entirety of the system called City. Its extreme complexity of interrelated structures over and under one another, threading themselves above and below grade may be experienced as a totality if one includes the light and sound which steam may carry outwards.”
— Joan Brigham