A Warrier & Dreamer
Wall Carpets Exhibition
1-10.8

“When making objects – of gold, silver, copper, iron, clay, vegetation – one takes from the mine or the field and shapes, refines, prepares raw materials and makes objects, clothing, jewelry, sculpture. What Noa Eshkol does – alongside the creation of the objects themselves – the carpets – is recreating the mine. The more she takes – the more she returns. Several times. Takes threads and returns the kingdom. She took sketches, material coming from several sources: plants, colors, potteries, users of cultures of generations – and created a new mine: a mine of fabric patterns, shapes, images. We are dealing here with a phenomenon. When an artist’s creation becomes a phenomenon – it’s not his anymore, very much not his. It becomes everyone’s heritage, not only in the passive observation way but also in the ability to continue and continue and continue in the same manner. Instead of the “I” as a goal – the “I” here is a means – production. …. This is a highly significant development in today’s culture, when art is in a period where, more and more, it is overcoming the “pornography of the self” and instead of opening horizons for creation, art is becoming “puffed up”, flabby and shrinking to the size and depth of personal decay, with aggressive sales promotion….. This is an example of human culture in the deep and broad sense of the concept. This is art at its best.”
Wachmann, 1996 , ‘Noa Eshkol – Tapestries’

Eshkol first began making Wall Carpets during the Yom Kippur War of 1973, when the only male member of her Chamber Dance Group, Shmulik Zaidel, was conscripted into the army. This led Eshkol to suspend work with her other dancers, saying: ‘This is no time to dance, we shall wait until the war is over.’[2] She then began assembling and pinning cloth remnants onto a blanket, later sewing them by hand; the result was the first of her textile assemblages. From then on, Eshkol only ever worked with found materials, beginning with her own clothes and scraps gathered from around the house. Once she exhausted her own stocks, she began searching further afield – kibbutzim across Israel sent their leftovers, and her dancers gathered offcuts from factories. This explains the repetition of shapes in the works; the negatives of identifiable garment parts such as shirt collars or sleeve openings, for example, appear frequently.

Created with pieces of uncut cloth – anything from kaffiyahs to uniform remnants – the elaborate compositions were stitched together by Eshkol’s dancers. Variously layered, folded, or collaged, she never used scissors to alter her source material, leaving much to chance and to the mood of any particular given day. While eventually resuming her work in dance, Eshkol continued to make Wall Carpets, passionately and prolifically, for the rest of her life. It has been debated whether the artist saw any parallels between her work in movement and in textile, and yet in different ways, both reflect her interest in the laws of geometry and kinetics, alongside the rootedness of her practice in the rituals of collaborative activity. Ranging from the figurative to the abstract, Eshkol’s unusual tapestries cast new light on a unique relationship between choreography and visual art. (text from Biennale of Sydney 2016)

In her only text addressing the wall carpets, Eshkol writes:

“This occupation had at first no explanation and ideology. It began as an entirely personal urge to make something, not something that involved an intellectual decision. This has not changed, except that with the passing of time, the accumulation of completed hangings, and their exhibition in public, an ideology of sorts has grown round it. It is not something that can be taught, something which can be awarded academic points, because there is nothing to teach. It has no rules , no theory – only passion”.

“…..The material is “vulgar,” vernacular: fabric such as is daily met with, and of kinds available anywhere in most of today’s cultures, so that it passes unnoticed most of the time, almost like the air we breathe. This is unlike Movement Notation, where the material is an abstraction of the movement of the body. The use of randomly acquired material gives the hangings virtually the nature of objects trouves. Looking at the material, it is seen that they are themselves compositions, at a low level – compositions in their printed or woven design, which is most often periodic in form. When not amorphic, the shapes of the pieces are quite repetitive, being mainly the negative shapes of body covering (sleeves, etc.), which bestow upon them a near-organic character, because of their association with parts of the human body which they were intended to enclose. These negative shapes are converted by the act of recomposition into new positive shapes, so that it is a sort of recycling, not only of the thrown away fabric, but also the discarded remnants of the designers’ thought. The colors in which the patterns are printed are of course not my choice. Here again, I choose from a palette which was not preselected. There is something of “action painting” in this process. The combinations that result reveal a choosing “I” – one that I do not always recognize as “me.”
(Eshkol’s text published in the catalogue, “Noa Eshkol; Wall Carpets”, Opelvillen Russelsheim, Hatje Cantz, 2013)