Curl up with a coral reef

Coral reefs: wet, hard (in places), living. Crocheted objects: fuzzy, soft, inanimate. So never the twain shall meet—right? Actually, sometimes you can hardly tell the difference.

"Crochet Coral and Anemone Garden" with sea slug by Marianne Midelburg. Photo by Alyssa Gorelick.

The top photo shows an actual reef. The bottom photo is a crocheted coral reef developed by The Institute for Figuring’s Crochet Coral Reef project as “a woolly celebration of the intersection of higher geometry and feminine handicraft, and a testimony to the disappearing wonders of the marine world.” Their concern is very timely. 2008 is the International Year of the Reef, and recently several new reports have indicated increased threats to coral reefs around the world. And their reef is nearly as spectacular as the real thing.

The IFF Crochet Coral Reef is a communal, collaborative project created by IFF co-directors Margaret and Christine Wertheim. Their ideal was “to have contributors from as many countries as possible – especially those nations with major reef ecosystems.” Both Margaret and Christine are natives of Queensland, Australia, off the coastline of which lies the threatened Great Barrier Reef.

The Institute for Figuring is an educational organization dedicated to “enhancing the public understanding of figures and figuring techniques. From the physics of snowflakes and the hyperbolic geometry of sea slugs, to the mathematics of paper folding and graphical models of the human mind, the Institute takes as its purview a complex ecology of figuring.”

The method for crocheting the reefs was developed in 1997 by mathematician Dr. Daina Taimina, based on the hyperbolic geometry of many sea creatures.

The whole spectacular Crochet Reef is subdivided into many individual reefs and parts of reefs, all differing in color and style.

Large scale anemone with brain coral head.

Orange brain coral with urchins.

Two sister city reefs have been developed.  Under the auspices of the Jane-Adams Hull House Museum, a reef was made and exhibited in Chicago in 2007.

A New York reef is still under construction. And a new offshoot, the Chicago Cambrian Reef, with weird forms reminiscent of creatures living during the Cambrian explosion, 530 million years ago, is being crocheted now by a small group of Chicago women led by Aviva Alter.

Photo by Aviva Alter

The Crochet Reef has been exhibited in several cities including Chicago and New York, and is showing in London this summer. The full exhibit schedule is given on the IFF website. But even if you can’t get to see the traveling reef, you can make one of your own. IFF sponsors workshops and lectures and provides instructions for crocheting coral reef forms on the site.