“Giant Coral Forest” sculptures, crocheted out of discarded plastic bags and other plastic detritus.
On Monday April 14, IFF Director Margaret Wertheim will present a lecture at Brown University. Titled “Reefs, Rubbish and Reason”, the lecture will explore the unique intersection of art, science, environmentalism and community art practice embodied in the IFF’s Crochet Coral Reef project.
The lecture is part of a week-long series of events that Margaret is doing at Brown as a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Theater Arts and Performance Studies.
Talk Outline:
At a time when climate-change denial is at a peak, humanity urgently needs positive messages for social change. In 2005, as an aesthetic response to global warming, twin sisters Margaret and Christine Wertheim sat down to crochet a coral reef in their Los Angeles living room. Today their Crochet Coral Reef project is perhaps the largest art + science endeavor on the planet, with almost 8000 active participants worldwide and more than 3 million exhibition visitors. In this talk, artist, writer and curator Margaret Wertheim will discuss the Crochet Coral Reef project and its unlikely conjunction of art, science, environmentalism and geometry. Tracing a line from sea slugs to general relativity and ocean acidification, Wertheim will raise the possibility that this nexus of art and science may encourage a shift in consciousness about humanity’s role in the ecological future of our planet.
See here for article in the current issue of The Brooklyn Rail about the Crochet Coral Reef project.