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

EMBEDDED ENERGY
A solo exhibition of site-specific work produced during Kochansky's residency at 701 Center for Contemporary Art is currently on view through April 5, 2009. More information is available at the 701 web site. Susan Lenz's review of the exhibition is available here.

LEARN COLLAGE and BOOK MAKING in ITALY
Ellen will be teaching a week-long workshop on found object collage and experimental book making in Orvieto, Italy October 4-10, 2009. A complete description and registration information is available at the Adventures in Italy website.

“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