Documenting the internationally acclaimed collective craft project by
the Wertheim sisters that brilliantly merges ecology, knitting, science
and installation art
Australian-born, California-based sister artists Margaret and Christine
Wertheim draw on a unique fusion of mathematics, marine biology,
traditional handicraft methods and collective art practice to create
large-scale coralline landscapes both beautiful and blighted. Responding
to anthropogenic crisis, their soft sculptures and wall-mounted reliefs
simulate living reefs using crochet techniques to mimic in yarn the
curling, crenelated forms of actual marine organisms. Initiated in 2005,
the Crochet Coral Reef project has been exhibited internationally. In
addition to their own reefs, the Wertheims have collaborated with
communities in 50 cities and countries to create local Satellite Reefs,
to which more than 20,000 people have contributed, constituting one of
the largest, longest running participatory art happenings on the
planet.
This publication gathers the Wertheims' work over the past 17 years
alongside a new Baden-Baden Satellite Reef, the largest to date,
encompassing over 40,000 individual coral pieces. With commissioned
essays about the scientific, social, environmental, mathematical and
communal dimensions of the project, the book provides a critical
in-depth look at a stunning example of the power of art and community in
the face of climate change. Collaborative, figurative, material,
conceptual, artistic, feminist and playful, the Wertheims' Crochet
Coral Reef alerts us to the reality that life on Earth is nothing if
not entangled.
"The Crochet Coral Reef risks making real and fabulated things together
to open up still-possible times for flourishing.... Palpable,
polymorphous, terrifying and inspiring stitchery." -Donna Haraway
