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.
Celebrating Circle (Wedding) is an abstract wall carpet with two round shapes radiating outward via exuberantly patterned fabrics contained by a thin, rectangular patchwork border with relatively quieter patterns. The work harkens back to the Bauhaus—among other historical avant-garde movements—with its stress on the interaction of abstract, geometric forms. Further, Eshkol’s use of found fabric without any alteration welcomes chance into the artistic process, while the rotating elements in the center recall EWMN’s most basic unit, the conical rotation of limbs. Although the composition of Celebration Circle (Wedding) may appear spontaneous and bristling with irregularities, it is the result of painstaking precision and exacting teamwork conducted within predetermined constraints, just as Eshkol’s own choreographies are conceived and performed without musical score, emotive gestures, or eye-catching costumes.