Noa Yekutieli's works combine manual paper-cutting and site-specific installations. The elaborate patterns Yekutieli creates in paper and found textiles are formal and conceptual explorations of the social-political patterns that have shaped her own history and narrative, such as war, conflict, denial, immigration, assimilation, and displacement. Many of the patterns Yekutieli brings up in her work are collectively considered to be ‘natural patterns’, while they are in fact ‘human patterns’. Such patterns are often accepted as natural in order to denounce the individual or collective responsibility we have for their results. Through the meditative-repetitive pattern-making, Yekutieli questions whether conflict, destruction and displacement are indeed considered a ‘natural pattern’ at this point and if so, whether it is possible to break these patterns and discover what lies at their root. This approach stands in dialogue with Yekutieli’s Japanese upbringing of observation of what the absent reveals about the present. In contrast, through the “adding” action of the textile works, she creates patterns with found fabric strips that are then interrupted, distorted and destroyed by a single pulling of a thread. The tangled fabrics are more akin to her Israeli identity, one that is unplanned, colorful, spontaneous, and related to difficult and complex histories and current conflicts with high political tension. The visualization of both these opposed actions allows Yekutieli to bring together different sides of her own history, through which she explores the meeting point of various narratives. This convergence is actually the story of immigration. Yekutieli’s intricate paper-cut technique allows her to explore the fine lines between displacement and multi-cultruness through which she aims to create a fragile space of observation. The found textiles introduce personal histories and also discarded remnants to portray a more layered individual landscape.
