Woolly Thinking

Teleri Lloyd-Jones finds inspiration and information beautifully woven together in a collaborative creative endeavour to raise environmental awareness - the Coral Reef.

Textile craft, brain-breakingly complex geometry and coral reefs – to date, three things never found in proximity. Margaret Wertheim’s current project combines all of them: ‘Just because you enjoy tatting doesn’t mean you can’t be into higher algebra,’ she insists, and the Hyperbolic Crochet Reef, an international community project she started with her twin sister Chrissie, deploys crochet in a groundbreaking geometric patterning to represent corals, which are accumulating into a reef. Since it was first exhibited in 2006, The Reef has grown to include eight different sections, and reconfigures itself every time it appears in public. In June, it arrived at the Hayward Gallery, where the London Reef, its newest evolving addition, will debut.

In the company of unassuming crochet, the word ‘hyperbolic’ seems incongruous. It’s a marriage that highlights the idiosyncrasies of the project: crochet as a route into geometries which make higher-maths graduates weep. Consider: by long convenient convention, we agree that we live in a universe, known as Euclidean space after the Greek geometer Euclid, where parallel lines never meet, but stay exactly as far apart all the way ‘to infinity’. This is probably false – space is ‘curved’, as everyone knows (without quite knowing what this means). What it means is one of two possibilities: parallel lines curve towards each other, and meet before infinity; or they curve away from each other. The first possibility can be modelled by the so-called ‘spherical plane’, closed and curving inwards; the second by the ‘hyperbolic plane’, curving away from itself at every point and infinitely ‘open’ – hyperbolic geometry has negative curvature, and infinite reach, and, while elements of it can be found in the natural world, in such organisms as kelp, lettuce or coral, it was thought impossible until the 1990s to create a physical classroom model of the mathematical space.

Then in 1997 a mathematician from Cornell University, Dr Daina Taimina, saw the possibility of connecting crochet to the problem geometers have investigating such complex, counter-intuitive space. She used the models as physical manifestations of the hyperbolic plane. With academic backgrounds in humanities and science between them – Chrissie has a PhD in literature and philosophy, Margaret majored in physics, mathematics and computing, the Wertheims are passionate about both: Dr Taimina’s discovery rekindled their childhood love of crochet. As she began making these geometric models, Chrissie Wertheim was struck by the similarity to coral reefs, a more organic approach to crocheting the objects occurred to her. On the website of their organisation, The Institute for Figuring, the twins posted a request for contributors, and the project quickly snowballed into the current, international operation. The Reef has evolved variously, and in sections, some aesthetically, on such motifs as colour, others more thematically: the ‘Toxic Reef’.

It’s two o’clock on Saturday afternoon and I’m being ushered into a rather dreary conference room in the depths of the South Bank Centre, where several workshops have been held, as prelude to the construction and subsequent exhibition. I should straightaway confess I have very little practical experience of crochet: confronted by a box of yarn, I feel a growing and ominous sense of inadequacy set in. Nearby, Ildiko Szabo whispers to Inga Hamilton: ‘I’m so excited!’ Szabo, a Liverpool textile artist, was one of the first to respond to the crochet shout-out two years ago, and has been adding to the reef ever since. Emails and yarns have flowed between Reef headquarters in LA and Liverpool, and the imminent appearance of one of its founders fills Szabo with nervous energy. I find it heartening that, in June, she will at last get to enjoy the reef she has helped make a reality. Hamilton, another prolific contributor, based in Bangor in Northern Ireland, has by contrast been assisting with the reef’s installation at the Chicago Cultural Centre in October last year. Here at the South Bank, she picks up her yarn immediately and crochets – without a hook, to my innocent astonishment – throughout the afternoon. 

Margaret Wertheim’s introductory presentation was intended to last 25 minutes, but happily stretches past the hour. Our guide is eloquent and impassioned, in a talk peppered with such phrases as ‘… if I had a fourth dimension…’ We are treated to explanations of Euclidean space, spherical space and finally the infamous hyperbolic space. My maths A-level was small comfort at this point; as an audience member later declared, ‘I’ve learnt more in the past hour than I have in 27 years.’ As Wertheim talks, hardened crocheters, listening intently, stitch on, with eerily automatic and almost dislocated hand movements. But as the maths threatens to overtake the crochet, the remaining troops become restless. It’s almost four: a lady in the back row asks ‘can we crochet yet?’ politely, and out come the rest of the hooks and yarn.

Chatting as I attempt to crochet, I discover one thing in particular: the integral role played by the internet within contemporary craft practices. Most here heard about the Reef project via online communities of knitters and crocheters. Such websites as Ravelry.com consistently appear in conversation, as do practitioners’ own blogs. The community reef project was born in cyberspace; it’s exciting to see so traditional a craft realised via so modern a technology.

The community aspect of the project neatly reflects the organic nature of the reef itself. Wertheim describes it as ‘a practical experiment in evolution, because anyone who takes up this project seriously goes off in directions of their own and develops new things that we would never have imagined. And we do think of it as the evolution of life, you start with these very simple proto-plasmal seeds, and one day you’ve got platypuses.’ Starting from a single request on the IFF website, the ideas threaded through the various networks of makers, culminating in thousands of kinds of crocheted coral arriving back in LA. Nor do analogies to the natural world end here. Wertheim repeatedly cites Goethe’s line, ‘Every creature is its own reason for being,’ as a demonstration of the inclusiveness of the project. ‘That said, there are certain creatures that draw more gasps of awe and admiration from us, but all creatures are exceptional. It’s an ecology, and the ecology requires little, in theory dull, things and beautiful spectacular things.’

Such faith in natural order speaks to the ecological dimension of the reef. During the workshop, we hear various mind-boggling, soul-destroying facts about the effects of global warming, dark inspirations of both the Toxic Reef and the Bleached Reef. Growing up in Queensland, Australia, the twins have a deep feel for the plight of the famous Great Barrier Reef, which is vanishing at a frighteningly rapid rate, twice that of the rainforest deforestation – the Crochet Reef stands in woolly homage to this amazing, threatened landmark. The Toxic Reef section is made up of plastics and trash woven into coral forms, at some points hideously ugly, at other surprisingly delicate. It’s intended to raise awareness of the vast reaches of debris, currently floating on the Pacific, tangled into a mass the size of Texas. The Bleached Reef, meanwhile, refers to ‘coral bleaching’, a literal loss of colour that’s a visual result of the ecological stress these organisms are under. This latter has a haunting simplicity in comparison to its brighter counterparts – I feel guilty for finding it the most beautiful.

Crochet is a heavily gendered skill, undiscussable without confronting those contemporary pockets of self-declared feminism that surround them, declarations that are, I feel, sometimes a bit dubious. ‘Stitch’n’bitch’ and ‘chicks with sticks’: these are phrases seeking to reaffirm such practices as declarations of bolshy female independence. While the complete Reef so far represents the work of hundreds of women, and just two men, the project is open to anyone. As Wertheim emphasises: ‘It’s a self sign-up, and I don’t care who you are if you want to do it.’ I was intrigued, as I waited for the workshop to start, to see if any men would appear. As Wertheim began, a rather smart gentleman arrived – and is this a frisson rustling through the audience, a palpable disappointment at his exit before any hooks are handed him? His identity revealed as Ralph Rugoff, director of the Hayward, his lack of crochet skills seemed somehow legitimised.

Undoubtedly the Reef Project entails a variety of political dialogues within itself, about gender, about craft, about ecology. ‘We can both wax lyrical at length about the political and philosophical important of this,’ agrees Wertheim, ‘but we didn’t set out to do a political project. Yes, there are a lot of political resonances that are important to us… people ask, “Is it feminism, is it craft, is it art, is it mathematics, is it science?” It’s everything! I don’t care what you call it, it’s wonderful.’ The Reef, in short, is meant to raise awareness of such issues rather than enforce solutions – and certainly one of the most interesting issues is the status of crafts. Initially the Reef’s audience was conceived as a scientific one; Wertheim thought it would show at natural history or science museums. But – in an implicit comment on the gendered skills of the scientific exhibition? – exactly the opposite happened: ‘The art world has embraced it and the science world has ignored it. Which is sometimes a mystery to me – but I think it is a true credit to the art world that it has seen the value of this project.’ Having found a home in galleries, the Reef opens up the vexed question of craft’s position within the art world: ‘We support the perception of craft,’ explains Wertheim. ‘It doesn’t have to be given the validity of art, it is indeed valid in and of itself.’ She describes crochet as a ‘feminine handicraft’, and admits to using the archaic and less accessible term ‘fancywork’ to pull it further from the realm of art/craft trends she views as highly masculine.

It’s five pm. The afternoon winds down, and women are leaving to take the story of the hyperbolic reef out to the wider world. My own attempts at crocheting remained sadly Euclidean, more like rope rather than coral. As I said goodbye to Margaret Wertheim, she excitedly asked to see my afternoon’s progress. The Reef Project does act on a policy of ‘no child left behind’ – but I think I’ll be leaving it in more capable hands.

Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef, Hayward Project Space from 11 June to 17 August 2008. This is a Southbank Exhibition in Partnership with the Crafts Council.  There are also publish workshops on Monday evenings from June 16 to 28 July.  For more information, log on to http://www.craftscouncil.org.uk/whats-on/view/hyperbolic-crochet-coral-reef

This article was re-printed, with thanks, from Crafts Magazine.

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Photo credit: workshop images: Kieron McCarron

Other images: Aaron and Cassandra Ott
Copyright: The IFF