When most children paint or draw with their parents, it rarely results in anything more than a new picture to hang on the fridge and a mess to clean up. But for Andra Eggleston, painting and drawing with her dad — famed Memphis photographer William Eggleston — paved the way for a new venture.
Two years ago, Eggleston (the younger) moved to Nashville from New York. While she'd studied textile design as a student at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles years before, she'd been torn between pursuing her acting career and her love of design. Moving back to Tennessee with her husband and young son provided the opportunity for her to reignite this passion.
"I had been missing textile design and wanted to get back into it," Eggleston explains. "I started taking trips down to go see my dad [in Memphis] once a month. I packed up all my paintbrushes and markers and crayons and notepads and watercolors and little paint tubes, and just kind of plopped down in his living room with really no strategy or goal, just hoping that he would inspire me to come up with something. I thought conversely that I could inspire him — he's painted and drawn his entire life, before he started taking photographs — and we've always had a common interest in textiles."
Eggleston says she and her father started finding hundreds of drawings scattered around his apartment, under couches, in books, and stacked in piles around his office. She started scanning them, initially intending to archive the work, but realized how well they'd further translate into textiles, and Electra Eggleston — "Electra" is what her father wanted to name her, but her mom won that battle — was born.
Launching next month, Electra will initially offer a small run of pillows at Wilder, a contemporary design store in Germantown, featuring her father's art displayed through what she says are some of the best digital printing processes available in the world, and on nonsynthetic materials such as cotton velvet and Belgian linen. Eggleston, who works out of a studio in the Wedgewood-Houston neighborhood, will work with interior designers for clients who want to utilize the fabrics, and she says opportunities for further collaborations and partnerships are endless.
"One huge part of Electra Eggleston is the fabric for interiors, and the other aspect of it completely as a side is licensing the collaboration," she says, envisioning the prints on everything from sunglasses to lingerie. "We're doing something with Otis James, which is going to come out Father's Day."
We can think of one dad who will be proudly wearing one of those Otis James ties. As for everyone else? You might want to put your name on that waiting list now.
More From the 2015 People Issue
The Textile Designer: Andra Eggleston / The Transformer: Bill Schleicher / The Chief: Steve Anderson / The Bookseller: Yusef Harris / The Producer: Dave Cobb / The Rookie: Filip Forsberg / The Pedal Steel-Playing Pilot: Joshua Motohashi / The Weathermen: David Drobny & Will Minkoff / The Punk Neuroscientist: Kale Edmiston / The Kitchen Artist: Karla Ruiz / The Metalhead: Kayla Phillips / The Image Master: kogonada / The Bartender: Lee Parrish / The Professor: Lisa Guenther / The Advocate: Marisa Richmond / The Captains: Kellie Hurst & Regina Durkan / The Painter: Michael Shane Neal / The Tunesmith: Shane McAnally
