Fragments of Desert, Ришон-ле-Цион, до 30 декабря

Eti Gadish De Lange gathers fragments that echo her childhood home in Arad and breathes new life into them. The forms created through acts of mending, weaving, interlacing, and wrapping bring together strips of wood and pieces of needlepoint tapestry. These pieces serve as a reminder to the handcraft practiced by Eti’s mother, who used to embroider tapestry scenes for the walls of their home in the desert. The works create an intergenerational encounter between mother and daughter, who engage in different forms of handcraft, yet their practices become interwoven, containing and reflecting one another.

For Eti, the tapestry holds her mother’s hands and the memories of watching her work. Yet her use of it does not express a desire to return to the past through nostalgia, but rather serves as a basis for an act of reappropriation. The forms, reminiscent of plants, shells, or fruit pods, cradle the tapestry within them, like a mollusk protected inside its shell. The contrast between the monochromatic natural color of the wood and the vivid colors of the cross-stitch embroidery speaks of the gap between the silence and bareness of the desert and the life that unfolded inside the home. The tapestry brings into the house an imagined, pastoral landscape, almost the opposite of the desert outside.

The collages combine strips of wood with fragments of tapestry, disrupting the romantic landscape scenes associated with this form of craft. Within the collage, the mother’s aesthetic and the daughter’s aesthetic can coexist. Their fusion gives the tapestry a modernist context and clean lines, extending the contours of the pastoral landscape in a more abstract, more distilled, more “desert-like” form.

The desert does not appear here as a representation of landscape, but as a material and mental state — exposed, eroding, and almost monochromatic. Opposite it stands the home as a site of accumulation: of color, texture, craft, and memory. Both exist together, within a single body.

The embroidered handcraft shifts from a feminine and decorative signifier into a presence carrying cultural and historical meaning. From embroidered wall tapestries that adorned the stone walls of medieval castles, tapestry became, in the second half of the twentieth century, a popular domestic pastime in Israel. Rural landscapes, forests, or shepherd girls were commonly depicted in a style that became an integral part of the interior design and leisure culture of the Israeli middle-class home. In Eti’s hands, tapestry transforms from a flat image associated with kitsch into a living cellular tissue, an "internal flesh" revealed through an open wound. Eti does not seek to rid the tapestry of its kitsch; rather, she chooses to work from within it. She does not conceal its romantic, sentimental imagery, but dismantles it into material and color. The pastoral landscape thus shifts from a domestic icon into a cell, a pixel, a fragment that can be reassembled into something that is no longer a landscape.

The joining of tapestry fragments and veneer strips creates an encounter between materials and techniques originating in different worlds: one rooted in nature and shaped by industrial use; the other labor-intensive and handmade, practiced as a personal hobby. The working methods Eti has developed take the wood from mass to skin, and the tapestry from surface to fragment. In this way, she explores the full range of possibilities between two and three dimensions, allowing the fragments to pile up, fold, twist, and transform from strips into surfaces, volumes, and cavities.

In fact, the fragments of material are the exhibition’s basic units of memory. Nothing returns in its entirety: not the landscape, not the home, not the embroidery, and not her mother’s image. Memory emerges precisely through the partial and fragmented, through what remains and through what can be reassembled together again. Longing, by its very nature elusive and amorphous, does not depend on reconstruction or imitation. Instead, it changes and takes shape anew through acts of dismantling and reassembly.