Nineteen century learning botanic and biology models were often made with glass by fine artisans.
Australian-born but Los Angeles-based sisters Christine, a poet and former painter and professor of critical studies, and Margaret Wertheim, a physicist and a science author, decided to move from these models, but radically transform their meaning, purpose and, above all, the materials employed to make them.
In 2005, while looking at some textile experiments on their living room table, they came up with an ambitious idea – crocheting a coral reef.
Soon after that first inspiration, they posted an invitation online and soon small and large models started appearing in the mail.
The sisters combined them with the shapes and forms they were creating and soon what started out as a small project became a global non-hierarchical collaboration.
As the years passed over 10,000 participants crocheted over forty Satellite Reefs in different cities and countries, creating a mesmerizing crocheted coral reef.
Selected results of this collaboration can be admired now in the Arsenale and in the Central Pavilion at the Giardini during the 58th International Art Exhibition in Venice.
In the Arsenale the installation is displayed in a space immersed in a dark blue light that evokes the marine depths.
The crocheted pieces are installed in glass vitrines and if you like the technique and love textiles, you will spend quite a while looking at these configurations.
At times the crocheted corals are made with yarns and threads; in other cases (see the "Toxic Reeef" installation) they incorporate beads, wires, old video-tapes, sequins, bridal adornments, tinsel, medical waste and ring-pull tops from aluminum cans.
The installation reflects the sisters' backgrounds as the arty aspects of the works reflect Christine's practice, while Margaret's mathematical drawings and sketches can be admired on a blackboard next to the display glass cases.
The installation is completed by the "Hyperbolic Sea Snake", a long crocheted colourful creature hanging from the ceiling and made with hand-spun and hand-dyed yarn by Australian programmer and sheep-farmer Helen Bernasconi, and by electroluminescent wire corals by Eleanor Kent from San Francisco.
The installation in the Central Pavilion is smaller and consists in a series of miniature "Pod Worlds" again made with the contributions of the volunteers who worked on the Crochet Reef pieces.
There are more corals in bright and vivid colours here, at times entirely made of beads, their crenellated shapes forming visually intriguing configurations and evoking hyperbolic surfaces.
The crocheted corals are an ode to time: it took the volunteer crafters involved in the project hours to make them, but they remind us that it took centuries to living reefs to form, and it is taking us a relatively short time to destroy them.
Bleached of colour due to rising water temperatures, the corals are also being suffocated by the trash accumulating in the oceans so that organic accretion is being replaced with toxic accumulations.
Last but not least, the crocheted colours evoke the power of mathematics and geometry as crocheting is the simplest way to represent in a material form the logic of non-Euclidean geometry.
Art, ecology and mathematics meet and combine therefore in these installations that could also be interpreted as a global archipelago.
Inspired by mathematics, pointing at living reefs and sounding an alarm bell for global warming and ocean plastic waste, the installations by Christine and Margaret Wertheim also show us that collaborative projects can lead to beautiful art with a global meaning and a noble purpose.
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