In 2006, we posted about the Institute For Figuring’s collaborative project to crochet a handmade coral reef. It’s come a long way. The Crochet Coral Reef is on display at Santa Monica’s Track 16 Gallery until February 21, along with the Toxic Reef, made from plastic trash. From the press release:
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 color and form unparalleled on our planet. But global warming and pollutants so threaten this fragile marvel that it may well be gone by the end of the century. In homage to the Great One, Christine and Margaret Wertheim of the Institute For Figuring have instigated a project to crochet a handmade reef, a woolly testimony that now engages thousands of women the world over.
Vast in scale, collective in construction, exquisitely detailed, the Crochet Reef is an unprecedented, hybridic, handicraft invocation of a natural wonder that has become, in itself, a new kind of wonder spawned from tens of thousands of hours of labor.
Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef (Thanks, Kirsten Anderson!)