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Comprising some 40,000 creatures created by forty crocheters from around the world, The Hyperbolic crochet coral reef, 2006-, is the brainchild of Brisbane-born physicist and science writer Margaret Wertheim and her twin sister, Christine, a lecturer at the California Institute of the Arts. Together the Wertheim sisters head up the Institute for Figuring (IFF), a non-profit organization in Los Angeles dedicated to promoting 'the aesthetic and poetic dimensions' of mathematics and science. Inspired by the concept of hyperbolic space, their reef project now straddles both the worlds of science and art, having outgrown the usual museum venues of natural-history to grace such contemporary art spaces as Pittsburgh's Andy Warhol Museum and, most recently, London's Hayward Gallery. Here, art audiences have become bedazzled by immersive environments of Technicolor brilliance, as well as being subjected to scenes of environmental devastation. What the IFF calls the reef's 'satanic sibling', the Rubbish Vortex is a tornado-like mass of woven plastic bags. As real reefs once did, so The hyperbolic crochet coral reef keeps expanding, adapting, and evolving to the point where it has become, in itself, a force of nature...

When hyperbolic space was discovered in the nineteenth century, it was considered 'the most useless piece of mathematics that anyone had ever come upon' Margaret Wertheim explains. Unlike the standard, flat Euclidean plane, the hyperbolic plane is in a state of constant curvature, with the surface seeming to multiply on itself. It is difficult to imagine let alone picture or represent. According to Wertheim, western mathematicians in the past had 'an important philosophical prejudice': they saw the world as perfectly Euclidean. And so, even though objects in nature have a hyperbolic form - think of the frilly edges of kelps, kale, or lettuce - no-one thought to put the two together until now...

The Wertheims posted an invitation to participate on the IFF website in 2006, and a flood of positive responses came from all corners of the globe - including the art world. As it happened, Pittsburgh's Andy Warhol Museum was about to mount an exhibition on global warming and invited the IFF to show their budding reef in 2007. Crocheters and other fibre artists began sending in pieces and innovating new forms. Among their most inventive contributors were Helen Bernasconi, a former computer scientist who now runs a sheep property at Bonnie Doon in country Victoria, and the Rubbish Vortex's creator, Sydney horticulturalist Helle Jorgensen. Crocheters went off on their own hyperbolic tangents, and their diversions brought forth new organisms. From simple kelps and coral polyps, the crocheters began inventing new reef members, including sea urchins (which are not, technically, hyperbolic) and new species of sea slugs, sponges and corals. The more experimental the crocheters became, the more real - and natural - the reef became...

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Summer 2008 issue.