narrative embroidery...

I love the narrative embroideries of fellow Brooklyn embroiderer Iviva Olenick. She uses thread to write sweet and sad stories and comments dealing with the lonely complications of contemporary love.


Often playing with issues of Internet dating and the bizarre and complicated navigation this arena takes.
Sometimes her work breaks your heart...

or reminds you of moments in your own life...

or makes you chuckle with its humor and sweet honesty. Iviva states:

In a culture increasingly reliant on the internet, email, and text messaging to communicate, connect, and reconnect, I have chosen embroidery, an old-fashioned and time-consuming medium, as my primary communication vehicle. I create vignettes smaller than one foot in scale incorporating text and illustrations. My collection of hand-stitched pieces is an unbound book or blog where I observe, remember, fantasize, daydream, and invent.

I particularly really love her series Family album, there seems to strangely be something more honest in these works. Though the language and images are not as seemingly obvious as her other series there does seem to be a more sincere vulnerability in the portraits of her loved ones.

This piece is especially sweet, with the embroidering of her grandmothers handwriting.
Check out her blog here.

So much inspiration abound, it is exhausting.