Noa Eshkol

The dancer, dance theorist and artist Noa Eshkol created her first wall hanging in 1973, when the only male dancer in her group was drafted into the Yom Kippur War. Without him, no further “movements” could be composed. In her strict, mathematical and geometric model of movement notation, the body becomes the material for rhythm and movement in the space. In the wall hangings, Eshkol turned pre-existing and collected pieces of fabric into the medium of her compositions. There was only one rule: the fabrics had to be sewn as they were, out of respect for the preexisting forms. Eshkol’s dancers spent hundreds of hours carefully sewing the textile collages that she arranged, a collective activity that became an expression of community solidarity. From then on, the wall hangings remained an ongoing preoccupation for Eshkol. Over the decades, fabric styles changed, with different motifs, colors and textures being introduced. She made large, extraordinary compositions out of repeated yet different forms, colors and patterns. Unlike quilts, her wall carpets did not adhere to history or tradition. New life was breathed into the discarded pieces of fabric, as if to say that the stagelike, ornamental and landscape space came together with the spaces within us. Feelings are expressed in the movements just as they’re expressed in the carpets. “Feelings have no names. They cannot be described with individual words, only through combinations of words, which together form images each time you try to recapture the original feeling.” 7 Feelings evoked within oneself when they watch flying birds across a desert landscape.