CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 8/30/2022

"Palpable, polymorphous, terrifying and inspiring stitchery" in Christine and Margaret Wertheim's 'Value and Transformation of Corals'

Featured spreads are from Christine and Margaret Wertheim: Value and Transformation of Corals, a book that no scientific, social, environmental, artistic, mathematical feminist or activist with a passion for sustainability, ocean life or handicrafts can do without. Almost 20 years ago, Australian-born twin sisters Christine and Margaret Wertheim realized that the world's increasingly endangered coral reefs could be simulated by a radical crochet technique based on hyperbolic geometry. Their Los Angeles-based Institute For Figuring and their collaborative global Crochet Coral Reef project have drawn attention to this environmental crisis ever since, with their most recent exhibition in Baden-Baden Germany gathering works produced by the Wertheims over the past 17 years, along with a monumental installation made by local crafters. Essayist Donna Haraway writes: "The Crochet Coral Reef is sym-chthonic. It is for and with the multispecies critters, including human people, of the deep and ongoing earth. The Crochet Coral Reef is palpable, polymorphous, terrifying and inspiring stitchery done with every sort of fiber and strand, looped by tens of thousands of people in dozens of nations, who come together to stitch care, beauty and response-ability in play tanks. This SF worlding is enabled by Margaret and Christine Wertheim's outrageous, chthonic symbiosis of science, mathematics, art, activism, women's fiber arts, environmentalism, fabulation and sheer love of the critters of terra. This is truly an Institute For Figuring."