Reading:

Chapter from 'Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies'
Edited by Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin

Notes:

Practical exploration:

Crochet Coral Reef 'a woolly celebration of the intersection of higher geometry and feminine handicraft, and a testimony to the disappearing wonders of the marine world'

Created and curated by Christine Wertheim and Margaret Wertheim of the Institute For Figuring.

'One of the acknowledged wonders of the natural world, the Great Barrier Reef stretches along the coast of Queensland, Australia, in a riotous profusion of colour and form unparalleled on our planet. But global warming and pollutants so threaten this fragile monster that scientists now believe the reef will be devastated in coming years. As a homage to the Great One, Margaret and Christine Wertheim of the Institute For Figuring instigated a project to crochet a woollen reef.'

The project began in 2005 by the sisters in their Los Angeles living room

For the first four years of its life the Reef took over their house, gradually expanding to become the dominant life-form in their home.

At the same time the project began to expand into other cities and countries until it has now become a worldwide movement that engages communities across the globe from Chicago, New York and London, to Melbourne, Dublin and Capetown.

The Crochet Reef is a unique fusion of art, science, mathematics, handicraft and community practice that may well be the largest community art project in the world.

The inspiration for making crochet reef forms begins with the technique of "hyperbolic crochet" discovered in 1997 by Cornell University mathematician Dr. Daina Taimina.

The Wertheim sisters adopted Dr Taimina's techniques and elaborated upon them to develop a whole taxonomy of reef-life forms.

Loopy "kelps", fringed "anemones", crenelated "sea slugs", and curlicued "corals" have all been modelled with these methods.

The basic process for making these forms is a simple pattern or algorithm, which on its own produces a mathematically pure shape, but by varying or mutating this algorithm, endless variations and permutations of shape and form can be produced.

The Crochet Reef project thus becomes an on-going evolutionary experiment in which the worldwide community of Reefers brings into being an ever-evolving crochet "tree of life."

The reef has grown far beyond its original incarnation on the Wertheim's coffee table so that today it is made up of many different “sub-reefs,” each with its own colours and styling.

Major sub-reefs include the Bleached Reef, the Beaded Reef, the Branched Anemone Garden, the Kelp Garden, and The Ladies’ Silurian Atoll, a ring-shaped installation with close to 1000 individual pieces made by dozens of our most skilled contributors around the world.

In addition to these delicate woollen reefs is also a massive Toxic Reef crocheted from yarn and plastic trash - a part of the project that responds to the escalating problem of plastic trash that is inundating our oceans and choking marine life.

Each crochet model results from the application of an iterative recipe. Like fractals, such as the Mandelbrot Set, these forms come into being through the process of doing a small set of steps again and again and again. Though experience often serves as a guide, there is no way to know in advance what a specific algorithm will produce and we have many times been surprised when seemingly insignificant changes in the underlying pattern led to fundamentally new results.