Kate Pokorny is a talented young artist living in New York who is, coincidentally, the daughter of Garden Club of the Back Bay Past President Margaret Pokorny.  Kate’s latest project can be followed on her new website, www.yurtalert.com.  In her own words:

“As a longtime felter I didn’t have the space to make the soapy mess required for the process after I moved to New York City in 2006. I experimented with needle felting and came upon crochet, which, to me, seemed like something you could make anything out of. This was further reinforced when I watched Margaret Wertheim’s TED Talk and saw how crochet can be used to represent hyperbolic space and coral reefs.  I became very interested in oversized knit and crochet work by artists like Kwangho Lee, Claudy Jongstra, and Christien Meindertsma.

I started crocheting a lot, and was making many small domes when I realized that the same form could be made much larger into a crocheted yurt. Historically, Mongolian nomads made felt for their yurts via a labor intensive process that still required an internal structure at the end of the day.  My project is to take that design a step further and make a locally-sourced (local to New Hampshire), self-supporting crocheted yurt out of hand-felted cording approximately 1.5 – 2 inches thick.”

You can follow the process on line, leave comments and suggestions, and we can all place bets on when Amy Adams will buy the film rights.