The environment catastrophe is confronted through thousands of crocheted sculptures.

 

PICTORIAL

The 1,400-mile Great Barrier Reef, according to a new report released this week by an Australian organisation, has seen its sixth mass bleaching. This most recent disaster, which occurs when ocean temperatures rise, damaged almost 91 percent of the vividly coloured marine ecosystems. As the climate issue worsens, disasters like this are becoming more common, forcing artists like Christine and Margaret Wertheim to respond with powerful exhibitions of what could be lost forever.

The Crochet Coral Reef project was founded by the Australian-born, California-based sisters in 2005 to combat the devastations of bleaching, overfishing, tourism, and agricultural contaminations through huge, labor-intensive settings. More than 40,000 aquatic sculptures are now on display at Baden-Museum Baden's Frieder Burda, transforming the exhibition into textured ecosystems perched atop pillars and protected by glass cases.

These handcrafted sculptures, like the organic beings they resemble, take time to create—time that is condensed in the millions of stitches on show, and time that is running out for terrestrial creatures like humans and cnidarians. Time serves as a framework for the Reef project, as time becomes increasingly scarce as CO2 levels in our atmosphere rise, and what we choose to spend our time on reflects our values.

Crochet Coral Reef aims to involve local communities, and about 20,000 people have so far donated their own fiber-based creations, with about 5,000 taking part in the show alone in Baden-Baden.

Making delicate paper cut flowers

Maude White, a paper-cutting artist, continues to dazzle us with her intricate images cut from single sheets of paper.

She explores poetic compositions of line and shape as she renders each piece with a knife, limited to only negative and positive space.

Characters made of wood with lanky, bent bodies

Tach Pollard, an Oxford-based artist, lets the sinuous contours of hawthorn or oak branches inspire the shapes of his imaginative characters.

The lanky animals have long limbs, slumped shoulders, and bowed backs, all of which are determined by the wood's initial curve.

The sculptures are cryptic and simple, based on legends such as the Norse Eddas, The Mabinogion, and the Icelandic Sagas—Pollard chooses to leave the natural colour and texture of the material intact for their faces and burns the remainder to achieve the deep, black char that envelops their figures

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