BOOKS

crochet coral reef - New Book 2022

Created by twin sisters Margaret Wertheim (an acclaimed science writer) and Christine Wertheim (a writer, poet, and art college professor), the Crochet Coral Reef is now the world’s largest art & science endeavor. In an inspired cross-disciplinary synthesis, the Reef project combines mathematics, marine biology, handicraft, environmental consciousness and community practice. The vast, visually stunning installations created by the Wertheims and their collaborators have been exhibited around the world, including at the Hayward Gallery (London), Science Gallery (Dublin), Museum Frieder Burda (Germany), The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History (Washington D.C.), 58th Venice Biennale (Italy) and Helsinki Biennial (Finland). In the community dimension of the project, over 20,000 people in 50 cities and countries worldwide have participated in making an ever-evolving archipelago of giant woolen reefs, constituting a unique global artwork whose tentacles extend from New York, Chicago, London and Melbourne, to Latvia, Ireland, Germany and the United Arab Emirates.

Two books about the project have been published. New in 2022 is Margaret and Christine Wertheim: Value and Transformation of Corals, a lavishly illustrated volume created in conjunction with a major retrospective about the project at Museum Frieder Burda in Germany. Available now from DAP.

With commissioned essays about the artistic, scientific, environmental, mathematical, and social 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, feminist and playful, the Wertheims’ Crochet Coral Reef alerts us to the reality that life on Earth is nothing if not entangled. Essays by Donna Haraway, Kayleigh C. Perkov, Heather Davis, Doug Harvey, Amita Deshpande, Christine Wertheim Margaret Wertheim, and Forward by Udo Kittelmann. Plus 200 pages of photos.

Science studies luminary Donna Haraway at UC Santa Cruz has hailed the project as “palpable, polymorphous, terrifying and inspiring stitchery.”