Nature and Culture

41cm x 28cm x 27cm

 

Description

Wooden box with drawer, pink felt lining. Top: crocheted hyperbolic structures, drawer waxed fabrics

 

Themes, Comments and Storylines

An exhibition with the title ‘The Hyperbolic Coral Reef’ took place this summer at London’s South Bank inspired by the crochet models of hyperbolic space by the mathematician Daina Taimina.

 

 

Hyperbolic space while common in nature is, the Times (1 July 2008) says, “so conceptually challenging that for a century mathematicians were unable to visualise what this type of space might actually look like […] there is no formula that accurately describes hyperbolic space, so computers can’t model it either.”

 

"Hyperbolic crochet is the product of an unexpected branch of geometry. For 2000 years mathematicians tried to prove the only possible geometries were of the flat plane and the sphere. Great minds expended themselves on the effort only to discover in the 19th century that a third option was available - hyperbolic space. Mathematicians' scepticism about hyperbolic space had been based in part on their inability to imagine what it would look like, they had no way of modelling it physically. Most were astounded when, in 1997, Dr. Daina Taimina, a Latvian émigré at Cornell University, presented a hyperbolic structure made with crochet. Nature, meanwhile, had discovered the form by the Silurian age. Corals, kelps, sponges, nudibranches and flatworms all exhibit hyperbolic anatomical features. Ways of constructing once perceived as  'merely' women's craft now emerge as revelatory of forms of a more complex, embodied way of thinking about the world both mathematically and physically."

 

Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef, The Hayward Project Space, South Bank Centre, London, July/August 2008

 

“He said that for the first time he could visualise a certain type of hyperbolic curve. He had been writing about them all his career, but it was all in his imagination. The difference with the crochet is that you can touch it. You can experience it.”

The Times, 1 July 2008

 The hyperbolic shapes in this box are small - only consisting of a few rows of crochet. But as the stitches are constantly doubled, the structure becomes dense and heavy as the surface curls under the increase. Continuing adding rows, each one twice as long as the previous one, results in a strange, brain-like shape. There is, in theory, no end - yet as in the story of the rice grains on the chessboard - the incrementation rate sets its own limits in practice.

 

 

 

Mirabilia “created art out of nature…, or rather merged the two to the point where they became indistinguishable, in a mutual exchange of properties and an absolute quality of perfection that could not fail to discountenance or disorientate the viewer. This transgression, the breaching of the opposition between the two mutually exclusive realms of creation, found its natural expression in the bewilderment of the astonished observer, and was the true source of wonder.” (Mauries 2002, p.109)

 

“Hybrids between art and nature or the ‘re-creation’ of nature by artistic forms; or cult of the extraordinary, with the power to overturn established norms, amaze the onlooker and arouse wonder: these are the twin threads … in the history of the cult of curiosities.” (Mauries 2002, p.116)

 

“Behind the poetics of rejects and relics that run like a common thread through these compositions, there looms – as to a greater or lesser degree throughout the history of cabinets of curiosities – the contrast and dialectic between ‘noble’ and ‘inferior’ forms of knowledge…” (Mauries 2002, p. 252)