Israeli artist, dancer, and choreographer Noa Eshkol is recognized in her home country primarily as a pioneer of modern dance and the inventor (with Polish-born, Israeli architect Avraham Wachman) of Eshkol-Wachman Movement Notation (EWMN)—a system for transcribing bodily movements on paper with extreme precision. In 1954, Eshkol founded her own dance company, Chamber Dance Group. When one of her dancers left the company to serve in the Yom Kippur War (1973), she temporarily suspended the company’s customary activities and started making textile collages the very same day by sewing together pieces of found, unaltered fabric. The making of collages—or, in her words, “wall carpets”—quickly became a major preoccupation for Eshkol, and in her lifetime she made over 1,800 with the help of company members who assisted Eshkol with the collection, classification, and sewing of fabric scraps.
Eshkol typically uses hardier, more utilitarian fabrics like blankets as the main support of her compositions with more delicate fabrics sewn on top. However, Umbrella Flower systematically integrates fragments from the same floral-patterned fabric at its center and edges, simultaneously confounding the distinction between background and foreground, creating an illusion of spatial recession. The centrifugal movement suggested by the mostly triangular scraps further bolsters the illusion and provides a visual parallel to EWMN’s most basic unit—the conical rotation of limbs. EWMN’s desire to capture and record fleeting human movement through specialized yet impersonal signs finds its analogue in Umbrella Flower. “There is something of ‘action’ painting in this process,” Eshkol suggests, adding: “The combinations that result reveal a choosing ‘I’—one that I do not always recognize as ‘me’.”