Nicolas Trembley
Curator

Expanded Craft

This exhibition presents two artists; Noa Eshkol (1924 – 2007, Israel) and Natsuko Uchino (b. 1983, Japan, lives in Belvézet, France): women from different generations whose work deals with notions of expanded craft. The works presented deal with recycling materials and concepts of local sustainability. They push the limits of traditional skills and craft materials while relocating them in the contemporary art ecosystem.

Noa Eshkol is primarily a radical choreographer. In 1954 she founded the Noa Eshkol Chamber Dance Group and invented the pioneering Eshkol-Wachman Movement Notation to capture and analyze corporeal movement. In parallel to her dance practice, she produced hundreds ‘Wall Carpets’ similar to quilts, starting in the early 70’s for a period of more than three decades. She pieced together scraps of fabric collected from textile workshops or gifted from friends and sewed them on larger swaths of fabric, such as blankets or bedspreads. Those vibrant and colorful abstract works can be displayed either horizontally on the floor or vertically on the walls and are only composed of found elements without a single fragment ever being cut.

Natsuko Uchino is an inter-disciplinary artist whose practice is defined by experiences in agriculture and crafts. Her works relate art to ecology and food through the use of ceramics.