Description
About this piece:
Having experienced traditional domestication when young (knitting, crocheting, sewing), I return to working with quilting fabrics to share stories of women working in the same way. Most of the fabrics came from my grandmother-in-law muse Pansy who shared some of her quilting leftovers with me. Maribelle is also the name of one of my husband’s aunts. The fabrics used for Maribelle’s Compulsion were scraps too small or beautiful to discard. This book is part of an ongoing series under the themes of “waste-not, want-not” and “woman’s work” and the first of a series of quilting stories about a long line of related women dating from the Civil War to the 1940s in a family with Biblical names who are self-employed seamstresses and quilters.
To include a narrative that did not disrupt the crazy quilt, it was added in the form of appliqued hexagons on a barrel roll structure. The narrative must be read as the book is rolled out. As one reads the text and rolls the book open to the right, more of the crazy quilt and buttons are revealed.
Materials:
fabric, thread, buttons
About the artist:
Lives and works in Bellingham, Washington
Elsi Vassdal Ellis, as EVE Press, has produced over 242 book, zine, and broadside editions via offset, letterpress, and digital printing, and 153 unique books since 1983 in a well-equipped studio with a view of Mt. Baker. Her work is permanently housed in over 150 collections including the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry, San Francisco Public Library Grabhorn Collection, Yale University Library Arts of the Book Collection, and The Wiener Library for the Study of Holocaust and Genocide, London.
