“Coral Forest” by Margaret + Christine Wertheim and the Institute For Figuring. Image courtesy of the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, University of California, Santa Cruz.

This is the final week of the IFF’s exhibition Crochet Coral Reef: CO2CA CO2LA Ocean at the University of California Santa Cruz Sesnon Gallery, hosted by the UCSC Institute of the Arts and Sciences.

Donna Haraway, who played a key role in bringing the show to campus, writes:

“Photographs did not prepare me for being in the Reef in the flesh. The simultaneously playful, wild, serious, and formal all came through viscerally as well as cerebrally. The Midden room was very powerful. I felt like I was moving through a veil to another reality as I walked through the kelp forest crafted from dense, heavy, entangled tape. Then, that other, darker reality in the night-time ocean enveloped me. The trash accumulation was palpable, heavy, looming, menacing, but also suspended, even as toxic elements were everywhere in each composition. Diving, walking, swimming—while a little dizzy and breathless because of the power of suggestion in the space … You have brought something magical to Santa Cruz just when we need it most.”

“The Midden” – four years worth of Margaret + Christine’s domestic plastic trash. Image courtesy of the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, University of California, Santa Cruz.