ELLEN KOCHANSKY owns and designs for EKO. In rural South Carolina, she has made quilts and textile art for over 30 years. She has served as an American Canvas panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts and as a trustee of the American Crafts Council. Her works are in many public and private institutions including the Museum of Art + Design in NY, and the Mint Museum in Charlotte, NC.

NEWS & EVENTS

TRANSFORMATIONAL POSTCARDS | MAKE ART in ITALY
Ellen will be teaching a week-long workshop on found object collage and experimental book making in Orvieto, Italy May 16-22, 2010. A complete description and registration information is available at the Adventures in Italy website.

BLUE SPIRAL 1
Asheville NC, April 1 through June 26, 2010.
Curiosities: What was old is new again… Celebrating the art of preserving and containing collections—Evocative assemblages of found objects, text, and fragmented relics engage the imagination. This invitational show coincides with Ellen's favorite theme, the priceless things we throw away. Personal effects from her late mother-in-law's life find their way into both two and three-dimensional archives.

“When we concentrate on a material object…the very act of our attention may lead to our involuntarily sinking into the history of that object. Transparent things, through which the past shines! Objects, inert in themselves but much used by careless life, (you are thinking of a hillside stone over which a multitude of small animals have scurried) are particularly difficult to keep in surface focus: novices fall through the surface, humming happily to themselves, and are soon reveling with childish abandon in the story of this stone, of that heath. A thin veneer of immediate reality is spread over natural and artificial matter, and whoever wishes to remain in the now, should please not break its tension film. Otherwise the inexperienced miracle-worker will find himself no longer walking on water, but descending upright among staring fish.”

Vladimir Nabokov