When we heard about Kate's cool project, we asked her to share it with our readers!
Hi! I’m Kate Pokorny, and I’m crocheting a yurt. Every time I type that, I feel as though I’ve confessed my wooly addiction to the world and, honestly, it’s the truth. About six months ago I went to the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York to see their Fashioning Felt exhibit—one of my favorite artists, Christien Meindertsma, had works in the show. The other exhibit they had up at the time was Design for a Living World, which paired each artist with a regionally specific, renewable material to make something out of: salmon skin, wool, tagua nut, etc. The pairing of these two exhibits started the idea of the yurt project – I wanted to take a renewable resource and create something that was both large in scale, functional, and beautiful.
Over the last few year I have been getting deeper and deeper into my love of crochet especially after I watched Margaret Wertheim’s TED Talk [1] and saw how crochet can be used to represent hyperbolic space and coral reefs. In 2007 I began experimenting with making small objects that I could do quickly on the subway or while on a conference call. I got very, very into domes. I started keeping track of artists I was into over at my website Pokate [2], and many of them were doing wild things with wool and with weaving. I found Kwangho Lee and Claudy Jongstra were particularly interesting.
All of this crystallized at the museum that day. I could felt massive yarn/cording and crochet it into a dome dwelling. Unlike historic Mongolian yurts, which still require an internal structure, this could, theoretically, be self-supporting and quite elegant.
So began the Yurt Alert [3]. I’m in the process of sourcing approximately 500 pounds of local New Hampshire wool, which I will then hand felt into 1.5-2 inch cording that will be crocheted using my arm as the hook. I whittled a huge crochet hook to build the prototype with, but it didn’t provide the flexibility I needed—the felted cording got remarkably dense after a turn through the washing machine!
The prototype was a huge success! In September I took 5 pounds of merino and made approximately 40 feet of cording. It encouraged me to move ahead with the proof of concept yurt, which will be approximately 10 by 10 feet. I’m currently fundraising for the wool and other materials at Kickstarter [4] and hope to have the yurt complete by May/June of 2010!
By far one of the best things to come out of the process so far is the support and collaboration it has engendered. I have engineers, architects, mathematicians, shepherds, carpenters, crocheters, artists, and everyone in between lending their thoughts to help troubleshoot and get this off the ground. It has been a wonderful excuse to call my mom everyday (as though I needed another one) and has allowed us to put our heads together to make something that will ultimately be the collective work of many!
Keep up with Kate's adventures on her site and get involved—in a few months we'll feature her finished piece here!
