@EmbroideryPoems #BrooklynTweets

Dear blog readers,

I learned a few weeks ago that I have a grant from the Brooklyn Arts Council, courtesy of the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, to collect and embroider Twitter "poetry." Yay! I am so excited!

I envision a web of interconnected tweeting between myself and poets, both self-defined and accidental, throughout Brooklyn and really everywhere. Sometime this spring or summer, I plan to have a live poetry reading with a responsive embroidery circle. The embroiderers will try to record the poets' words, but since they won't be able to stitch quickly enough, they will end up embroidering what they remember, resulting in new "found/accidental" poems.

The beauty of Twitter is in its ephemeral nature. But this ephemeral quality is exactly what I'm trying to counteract:
I find our obsession with disposable communications sad, and long for a sense of permanence and meaning. That's why I'm embroidering tweets, and also why I'm seeking writers who use Twitter to say something important to them. 

So you, yes you, blog readers, can help. Tweet me @IvivaOlenick or @EmbroideryPoems. I need you, yes, you!

One of my first embroideries for this project appears below. Thanks @postcrunk for the words, which seem to have resonated with so many people. 

Don't use Twitter? That's ok. You can follow along via my new blog for this project.

So many people in NY

Aerial View, Cloud City: FiberGraf and the Brooklyn Love Exchange at Muriel Guepin Gallery

Today is the last day to see The Brooklyn Love Exchange and FiberGraf at Muriel Guepin Gallery.

The piece shown here, "Aerial View: Cloud City," involves multiple steps and processes. My FiberGraf collaborator, Jon Baker, and I each worked on it for several months. I started by painting the fabric a medium blue-purple using permanent fabric paint. I deliberately left some of the fabric bare. Jon began drawing on it with fabric markers, and kept going...In between his drawing sessions, I added in French knots, which are denser in some areas than others. I started with embroidery thread that matched the medium dark purple in the background. Later, as I ran out of thread, I started to use my fabric paint to dye grey and light greyish-green thread to match some of the lighter and darker areas of the ground.

We are planning more pieces of this nature, where we mix media and techniques, and work simultaneously and alternately on the same piece.

You're an elixir