Hyperbolic Crochet

As part of a course a Design & Deliver Community Arts Projects course at Stroud College, I experimented with hyperbolic crochet. I produced the coral reef fascinator as a response the Arts Couture Painswick Wearable Arts festival theme of biomimicry. I also hosted a drop-in workshop at Atelier in Stroud as part of the SITE Festival programme. I plan to develop this project in the future by developing a collaborative making workshop. 

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Discovered’ by Professor Daina Taimina in 1997, hyperbolic crochet solved a problem that had been puzzling scientists and mathematicians since the mid 19th century: how to model and study hyperbolic planes, a form of non-Euclidian geometry that could help to understand the shape of the universe itself.

 

Once she started making these models it became apparent that these shapes, with continuous negative curvature, were present in many corners of the natural world, from lettuce leaves and kale, to coral reef and sea slug’s skirts.

 

Hyperbolic crochet is a free-form and experimental technique that can be created without a pattern and in infinite variations just by learning a couple of simple stitches. My interest in it stems, not only from its collaborative and creative potential, but because it shows how arts and crafts can inform us about other subjects such as science, maths and nature.

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