Mary Harrington

Professor Lavender
English 3070
16 March 2015
Hyberbolic Crochet
On March 16, 2015, I attended a lecture by Professor Sophia Roosth entitled:
Evolutionary Yarns in Seahorse Valley: Living Tissues, Wooly Textile, Theoretical Biologies. I
must admit, prior to the lecture, I was a bit intimidated by the density of the title, but I was soon
to discover how unthreatening and relatable Roosth was in her approach to the material. Roosth
started her lecture by showing videos of strand beasts. These beasts are made from recycled
bottles and through aesthetics and science, can move along the beach side with such ease and
intricacy that they seem remarkably lifelike. A bolded phrase then appears on the screen: life is
a concept, not a reality. Roosths begins to introduce the star of the show, the hyperbolic
crotchet coral reef. These reef organisms are made entirely of yarn and, due to their complex and
unrestricted design, Roofths argues that they suggest the potential of all living things. I will
get into to exactly how the reef is a metaphor for evolutionary biology shortly; but first, I want to
explain how these two typically separate spheres of crochet and science intertwine. A pair of
twins named Margaret and Christine Wertheim co-created this hyperbolic coral reef as a means
of drawing attention to the harmful effects climate change have on the reefs. The crocheting
serves as a method of fabricating models of hyperbolic geometry. Hyperbolic crocheting of reefs
was originally done using one single color of yarn for the creation, but Margaret and Christine
started mixing yarn colors and suddenly, the designs came to life (meaning they looked more
realistic). They developed this idea of the crochet coral reef but knew it was more work than they

could do alone, so through connections and the World Wide Web, they were able to build a team
of around 50 people to help them on their mission. The crafters were diverse; they ranged from
scientists to librarians to math teachers to artist and even a sheep farmer. These people worked to
create something that comments on the fact that evolution is open-ended, historic, and time
consuming ( it took a while to create the reef). What I found most fascinating was how the reef
metaphorically represents evolutionary biology in a number of different ways. I learned that it is
similar to the private Darwinian path, which puts emphasis on letting the inner nature of a
work develop and grow organically, in that those creating the reef had no set limitations on how
large they should create their crocheted work; they simply let it grow as it should and ended
when it seemed fit. Roofths referred to one of the twins naming this process of the artist
choosing to terminate things he/she does not like as artistic selection, similar to biologys
process of natural selection. Another analogy was that the linear thread of textile imitates
DNA. Roofths made several proofs of the processes of life in nonliving things. The reef, to
those who made it, was not alive, but it was evolving and changing and in that way, represented
the vivacity of living things. The wooly creation is cultural material that symbolizes the way of
thinking about biology. Roofths ended the lecture with a curious thought: life is something by
which we must be persuaded. With modern day technologies such as computers, robots, etc., it
is not crazy to think that something artificial can exist and function in the same way humans do.
This hyperbolic crochet reef might be a stepping-stone in the path to persuading people that life
is more dynamic than we believe, and that it can be embodied by something as atypical as some
yarn, people, and a reef.