In 2005, newspapers were filled with articles about human-caused destruction of the Great Barrier Reef, the world's largest coral reef system.

For Christine and Margaret Wertheim, it hit close to home — literally. The California-based twin sisters, one of them a former painter and poet and the other a science writer, grew up in Queensland, Australia, where the reef is located. They decided they had to take action — so they picked up their crochet hooks and asked others to join them, too. 

What started 17 years ago as a way to draw attention to global warming caused by human activities has grown into quite possibly the world's largest collective art and science initiative: the Crochet Coral Reef project.

Along with the Wertheim sisters, more than 20,000 participants — mostly women — around  the world have spent countless hours crocheting millions of stitches, creating woolly corals and other undersea creatures that the sisters then join together in a large-scale and endlessly evolving collective art installation.

"If anyone had said to me in 2005 that I'd still be crocheting corals in 2022, I would've thought they were mad," Margaret Wertheim told DW. "The scale that the project has been embraced at on the international level is absolutely delightful ... We had no idea it could evolve to this big."

Since the project's launch, an estimated 2 million people have seen Crochet Coral Reef in galleries and museums around the world.

In 2019 it gained widespread international attention at the Venice Biennale.

Now the Frieder Burda Museum in Baden-Baden, southwestern Germany, is featuring the installation in a giant retrospective show, titled "Value and Transformation of Corals." 

Crocheting with hyperbolic code

The museum's entire exhibition space is filled with ruffled corals, towering tubular anemones and squiggly spirals in eye-catchingly bright colors, mirroring the vibrancy of nature.

Both the sisters' reef creations, which combine videotape, tinsel and detritus along with yarn, and a community-based creation (known as a "Satellite Reef") are on display. Together, they transform the museum into a fantastic and uncannily realistic underwater landscape.

But the crocheted creations bear more than just superficial resemblance to coral reefs. 

Corals' ruffled shapes are living manifestations of what is known as hyperbolic geometry. Unlike the Euclidian geometry, which deals with flat surfaces, hyperbolic geometry captures curved planes in space. Such forms are found in nature, as they are ideal ways to maximize surface area, which is often essential for survival. 

"All the frilly forms that we make are basically derivatives of a kind of service called hyperbolic geometry, which uses alternative geometry that mathematicians discovered fairly late in history, but corals have been doing for hundreds of millions of years," Wertheim explained. 

Mathematicians long considered hyperbolic geometry impossible to model, but in 1997, Daina Taimina, a mathematician at Cornell University in New York, realized that such models could be created by doing what women had been doing at home for centuries: crocheting.

The Crochet Coral Reef uses her hyperbolic crochet code as its base pattern, turning the handicraft into a form of applied mathematics.

"So there's this lovely story, that underlying the making of these objects is both feminine handicraft but also knowledge about the foundations of geometry," said Wertheim, who started crocheting with her sister in her early teens.

At its most basic, the hyperbolic crochet code involves increasing stitches at a regular rate. If the rate remains unvaried, a perfect hyperbolic form emerges, "something you could take into a math classroom," Wertheim said. "But mathematically perfectly regular things very rarely appear in nature. A coral is growing and maybe there is a bit more sunlight on this side, or the nutrient flow of water is a bit more on this side, so it grows a bit more curly on this side. "

She and her sister encourage contributors to "queer the code," or vary the rate of stitch increase. What results are crocheted corals that look like corals — imperfect, varied, diverse — and that echo through production and appearance the organic creativity of evolution.

"Just like there's no end to the life on Earth — you know, there'll be creatures in a million years that we haven't even thought of now — and the crochet reef is like that, too, and we hadn't really expected that," Wertheim said.

Community-based art

Contributed corals are combined into the Satellite Reefs, the crowdsourced element of Crochet Coral Reef, yet another parallel to actual coral reefs, which are collective structures created by billions of individual coral polyps. 

As of 2021, over 48 Satellite Reefs had been made in different locations around the world. In non-pandemic times, museums organized open sessions where contributors would get together to crochet.

For the Frieder Burda exhibition, the museum put out a call in a popular German women's magazine, whose huge readership meant creations poured in from around the German-speaking world and beyond. The resulting Satellite Reef is the largest to date by far, featuring more than 40,000 corals. Previously, the largest Satellite Reefs featured around 4,000-5,000 corals.

"We always envisioned it as a community project that would bring people together to make lovely installations of coral reefs and through crochet, which is a wonderfully expressive medium, and that the installations would be beautiful artworks that could help bring attention to global warming and the fact that it was real and happening now, not just some future nebulous, maybe in 100-years-time problem," Wertheim said.

Global warming has only intensified since 2005, and Wertheim believes it has contributed to the project's expanding success. "The problem of global warming has only got worse and worse and worse with each passing year, and so the relevance of the project to the most important issue of our times just gets more and more. That's the bad thing."

But she also believes the project has benefitted from a pivot by museums toward more community-oriented programming. "Lots of museums and institutions, galleries, etc., really want to do participatory projects which engage the audience directly rather than, say, having the audience just come to the museums to look at works by famous artists," she said.

While demand to show Crochet Coral Reef has increased, as a community art project whose works are not sold and therefore generates no profit, its ongoing existence depends entirely upon funding — much like coral reefs themselves, Wertheim explains.

"Everybody wants the corals. Everybody loves the corals. The people in the region need the corals. But funding the upkeep of the corals is a hard thing to get anybody to step up to the plate to do ... They're not in the monetized system, and community art is a bit like that. It's not within the monetary system of the art world."

The exhibition "Value and Transformation of Corals" is on display at the Museum Frieder Burda from January 29 through June 26. Virtual tours are available via the museum website.

 

Edited by: Elizabeth Grenier