Anemones - Actinologia Britannica

Natural History Museum Opens The Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef In Washington

The Natural History Museum In Washington has opened The Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef an exhibition by the Institute For Figuring and Companions, on view through April 24, 2011.

A sea of vibrant colors and fantastic structures, the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef evokes a sense of stewardship of their real-life counterparts through a whimsical and beautiful display. Atolls and clusters of crocheted corals, made of both yarn and found materials, weave their way into unique coral communities. By using particular crocheting techniques that employ hyperbolic geometry, these reefs take shape into complex, natural-looking forms.

Margaret and Christine Wertheim, co-founders of The Institute For Figuring, have created an exhibition that combines the mathematics of hyperbolic geometry with the delicateness of this traditionally women’s handicraft. The Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef is a traveling exhibition that not only displays these artworks, but also incorporates an ever-growing social project—teaching others around the world how to crochet hyperbolically and make their own reefs. By working through this process and viewing the art, one can see the correlation between the crocheted reefs and living corals, such as the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. The fragility of the coral reefs is echoed by their crocheted counter parts.

Hyperbolic Crochet

So what is hyperbolic crochet? It’s a technique that combines crafting and math to create beautiful, complex shapes. Dr. Daina Tamina at Cornell developed hyperbolic crochet to create a complex, mathematical model.

Wertheim talks about hyperbolic crochet and its contribution to mathematics, summing it up with this amazing line: “So here in wool, through a domestic feminine art, is the proof that the most famous postulate in mathematics is wrong.”

Artist: Timothy Horn

Currently based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, sculptor Timothy Horn was born in Melbourne, Australia. He studied Sculpture at the Victorian College of the Arts and then Glass at the Australian National University. A Samstag Scholarship brought him to the US in 2002, where he completed graduate study at Massachusetts College of Art.

Horn's work straddles several disciplines and draws from a broad bank of skills, including blown glass, cast lead crystal and various metals. His current "Tree of Heaven" series combines the two distinct sources that have inspired his work over the past decade: those being patterns of 17th and 18th-century jewelry, and 19th-century studies of natural forms such as lichen, coral and sea weed. Beginning with the silhouette of an item of jewelry projected at a much larger scale, Horn drafts a working pattern with the addition of grafted imagery of natural forms. He then sets about fabricating a tree-like structure in wax, to be cast in bronze and nickel-plated. Pearls become large baroque forms in mirrored blown glass.

The focus of Horn's work is the meeting point between the natural and constructed worlds, where he attempts to locate the area of slippage between the organic and artificial. Scale is important, but he also chooses to work with materials for their inherent physical and metaphorical qualities. In 2008 the fabled "Amber Room" belonging to Catherine the Great of Russia, considered "the eighth wonder of the world", inspired a crystallized rock sugar encrusted carriage for Horn's exhibition Bitter Suite at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. Inspired by 19th-century zoologist Ernst Haeckel's engravings of jellyfish, he began an ongoing series of large works made of transparent rubber, that culminated in his first solo exhibition in New York, Villa Medusa in 2006.

Horn's work has featured in exhibitions at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, GoMA in Brisbane, and the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. Horn has received grants from the Pollock Krasner Foundation, Massachusetts Cultural Council, LEF New England, the Australia Council and a Queen Elizabeth II Silver Jubilee Award. Residencies include the British Academy in Rome, Yaddo in upstate New York, the Fine Art Works Center in Provincetown and RAiR in New Mexico.

Timothy Horn is represented by PPOW Gallery in NYC, where he will have solo show in the fall of 2011.

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http://www.timothyhorn.net/index.php

Jellyfish - Angst and Hullabaloo