Anyone who stares closely for more than a second or two will be able to look through my camouflage jumpsuit and see that, underneath, I’m pretty much naked. I’m wearing the standard set of skivvies, and also socks, but aside from these scant underthings, all that stands between my skin and New York City is a layer of crocheted camo lacy enough to see right through. And because it’s fluorescent green and orange, I doubt it’s helping me blend in. Luckily, though, it covers my face.

I can see between the sweater-y fabric’s threads—more or less—into Manhattan’s crowded Union Square. Hundreds of breaths—several hours’ worth—have condensed on the yarn that’s stretched tightly over my head, a ski mask without holes.

I’m lucky that it’s warmed up some this weekend and that the snow has yielded to a silvery mist. Raindrops slide right past the jumpsuit’s twisted loops to prick my shoulders, chest, belly. As I move, the suit stretches over my skin, every part of my body pulling on another. I’m wound up, a tensile being, a human sculpture, faceless, disappearing, and at the same time, turning heads all around me. And I’m just a member of the audience. Or so says artist Agata Olek.

For Olek, 29, the real performers are the observers—so, although I am “performing” her piece “Thank You For Your Visit, Have a Nice Day” in New York’s Art in Odd Places festival, it is I, hiding behind a crocheted scrim, who am being treated to a show.

It’s a show I’m glad I’ve gotten, when I sit down the next morning to share a bottle of wine with Olek and talk about her work. Getting behind the fabric, peering out, watching everyone’s reactions, Olek assures me, I was the one seeing the art.

“I grew up in a place where everyone was white, Polish, and Catholic,” she says. “I was the weirdo. Then I create these pieces that totally cover the whole body. Once you camouflage something, you make it invisible. But these colors I choose pop in your face. My art is about the deconstruction of personality, but also, hyper-personality. If you’re different, you’re hyper-visible.”

Even on a normal day, Olek is hyper-visible. Her handmade, ruffled pants and velvet filigreed tailcoat flutter as she moves.

“I have to come here every day, just to say it’s mine,” Olek grins. We’re scoping out her new Brooklyn studio—a refurbished florist warehouse—me clutching my tape recorder; and her, something bubbly in a brown paper bag. She’s just signed the lease last week, and has yet to move in. The floor’s recently been refinished and is a little dusty, but no problem: Olek has come prepared. She unfurls a heavy roll of crocheted fabric—the sort of thing that looks like it may have a corpse inside—that we’ve wheeled the few blocks from her home, balanced precariously on the seat of her bike.

We settle on the wide white swatch of crocheted twine, and I click “record.”

“Interview with Olek, morning of Sunday—“ I start to say the date when Olek interrupts me.

“It’s not Sunday morning.”

“Sunday afternoon, scratch that.”

“It’s Olek’s Sunday morning. Morning for Olek,” she admits, pouring glasses. “Cheers. Cheers—my first drink in my studio building.”

If she’s had a late night, it’s certainly not the first. Born Agata Oleksiak, she prefers now to go only by Olek—a one-word title that, like Cher or Madonna, indicates a certain sort of stardom—and the excesses that go with it. But Olek’s long evenings qua New York artist aren’t only about wild parties: She’s just as often alone in the darkness, burning the midnight oil, fingers flying.

Some of Olek’s installations have documented her in action. For instance, the white expanse on which we’re seated was a “ceiling” she wove for a show in her native Poland, focusing on the invisibility of women’s work in everyday life. After the piece was hung over the gallery’s existing ceiling, Olek explained, “They invited me to come to the opening to complete the work. Now, by complete the work, I mean I wanted to perform it also. We had this really, really tall chair. I sat naked there for nine hours next to the crocheted ceiling. I was crocheting a dress for myself. I put on the dress. I was comfortable.” Then, Olek explains, she plucked a string from the hem and began to crochet a new dress from the same yarn, slowly unraveling the finished dress to reveal herself once again.

“And when that one was finished, I put it on again.”

She notes that it is “hard to find places that will allow you to do a piece in eight, nine, 12 hours. I find a place that wants me, and they say, ‘Can you do it in an hour?’” She rolls her eyes, indicating her response to curators who simply want dead art to hang on their gallery walls.

“I’m like, ‘Oh, fuck you.’”

Olek doesn’t consider herself a performance artist, but rather, a sculptor. “The piece that I crochet on my body, it’s just me sculpting. It’s what I do all the time in my studio. The only difference is that now, I put myself in front of people to see it.”

For Olek, the audience is the crucial part of the equation. “Performer, participant, audience member: The triangle has to be moving all the time. It’s always shifting. It doesn’t matter what you’re wearing.” Olek, whose ruffled pants give the impression that she’s jammed each foot into a tiered wedding cake, gestures to my own jeans, T-shirt, and paint-spattered black shoes.

“You know, whatever you’re wearing, it’s a costume. You wake up in the morning and design yourself through what you wear.”

For Olek, it’s easy to blend the fancifully fantastic and the everyday. Perhaps part of the reason is that her medium is crochet—a traditionally utilitarian craft that originated in nineteenth century Europe. Olek had learned the skill as a child in Poland, and appreciates it as a poignant metaphor for the feminine. At the same time, Olek has grown tired of such an obviously comfortable interpretation, “reclamation of handiwork.” As the metaphor grows threadbare, she continues to pursue the art form for simpler reasons: “I have ideas in my head and I want to produce them. The easiest way for me to express my thoughts, you know, it’s by crocheting.”

These expressions have ranged from the large-scale (covering entire buildings or cars with multi-covered camo) to the intimate (creating cozies for fruit). They’ve ranged from cheeky (in “Text Machine,” a series of tapestries with messages like “UR pussy is my soul mate” remind viewers of the devolution of our tech-mediated society’s idea of romance) to the truly bizarre. In one work, she crocheted 8-mm film into a bodysuit, one end of which she fed through a projector. As the film played and her subject was unraveled, the free end of the tape was melted into a tasty filling for a series of grilled-cheese sandwiches; a Panini press attached the sandwiches to the tape-like beads on a necklace, which was passed throughout the audience as it slowly lengthened.

Olek, who graduated from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, with a degree in Culture Studies, moved to New York in 2000 for a residency at Sculpture Space. Ruefully, she recounts an interview with an art critic who asked her to describe her experience growing up and moving to the States.

“No no no no no,” he said, when she’d finished. “You have to say it was so hard for you coming from Poland, being a woman.“

She shrugs. “I’m like, no, it wasn’t. I was a hot chick, you know? I had great ideas. And now I’m here, and this is awesome, too. But they only want to hear about the hard times in Poland.” Olek finishes her glass of wine.

“So yes, you know,” she winks. “It was so hard for me. There were no crochet hooks. I was dreaming my whole life. Of crocheting. So I had to come to America. To buy crochet hooks.”

She pours herself another glass, and takes out a pouch of tobacco to roll a cigarette. When she’s done, she stretches out own the crocheted floor of her bare studio, and squints at me, considering what to say next.

“I really don’t know much about art, you know. I just like doing it. It’s too much fun not to.” And with that, she pops back up and starts surveying her new studio space, already planning her next move. I just have one more question for her.

“If you had infinite time, and infinite ability, would you—” She cuts me off.

“Crochet over everything? Yes.”