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Ellen Anne Eddy: Quilts from the Deep
he intensely worked surfaces of Ellen Anne Eddy's quilts teem with life: animals, insects, and fish propel themselves through magical subterranean worlds of waving sea weed and plant life. Eddy's quilts, with their crowded surfaces of images and sti tches, also give the illusion of immense depth. It is this contradiction that interests her. "I 'm interested in showing the microcosm and the macrocosm at once," she said recently. ''I'm inter ested in how systems work together, how things react to each other, how things move, the way animals move in water." Eddy builds up shimmering natu ral worlds on top of a traditional quilt backing with mUltiple layers of appliqued and embroidered cotton pieces. She hand dyes all her fabric, interspersing and juxta posing various colors throughout the quilt to achieve a sense of filtering and gradation , of light passing through a watery or transparent surface. Her last layer on a quilt will usually be pieces of tulle or organza net, embroidered over and over in metallic thread for a final glistening edge. A large qUilt can take Eddy as much as four months to complete. Eddy's themes origi nate in her dreams and daydreams . As a young adult, she began having migraine headaches that kept her in bed with "wild dreams." She decided to make quilts of those images. Eddy acquired her first sewing machine as a teenager and began quilt ing at age 21. She has developed into a sought after teacher who does lectures and seminars on
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what she calls "thread magic"-how to make the best use of a sewing machine and how to use any kind of thread to create art . All of her own art work is done on a heavy-duty 930 Bemina sewing machine. Eddy says she is "tweaking" the technique of embroidery. "I'm learning constantly to do the anatomically impossible," she says wryly. "Let's see if we can break all the rules." She admits that her quilts "tend to scare" traditional quilters because they are image oriented, not geo metrical and abstract; yet she con tinues in her search for the best way to create illusion and depth in her quilts. "My goal is to make my work crisper, sharper, more defined, and stronger," she says. "I want to find out how to make something look
wet, to create an illusion, in a quilt. How do you make smoke and fire?" -Polly Ullrich
Polly Ullrich is a writer and artist living in Chicago and completing a graduate degree in art history with an emphasis on art made of crafts media.
Secret Garden, 1994; cotton quilting, thread; quilting, machine sewn; 54 by 50 inches. Photo: courtesy the artist.