Adrian Pepe: A Shroud is a Cloth
A shroud is a cloth. A shroud obscures, but it also protects what is underneath. A shroud cradles that which it covers at a time of transition, a transmutation from one state to another. Above all, a shroud is indexical: it says that something once came from the land, was severed from it, and will now be returned to the land. The human that is made of clay and mud returns to clay and mud; ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
A textile is in itself an expression of the landscape it comes from. It has a terroir that is reflected in its texture: the diameter of each strand and its crimp, which in turn affects its softness or coarseness and insulating properties. Among animal fibres, wool is especially remarkable for its ability to absorb moisture without getting wet; put another way, it is uniquely able to not just reflect its terroir, but carry its atmosphere with it. And while we tend to think of terroir as climate, soil composition, and the particular grasses that an animal might eat, we should extend our understanding to other elements, namely the accumulation of culture and history that is as much a part of any terrain as its mineral content.
As the animal grazes, its hair, fur, or wool also accumulates in its surrounding landscape, picking up burrs which have co-evolved to have a commensalistic relationship with the animal that carries and deposits these seeds elsewhere, ensuring biodiversity. Humans, in turn, have manipulated these animal fibres as clothing and as shelter, resulting in morphological changes over time as the body evolves to adapt to new climates. In his textile-based practice, Adrian Pepe primarily works with wool from Awassi sheep, an ancient fat-tailed breed that has been reared in its native Mesopotamia and Levant for over 5000 years. It is the ur-sheep of Abrahamic religions and ritualistic practices, slaughtered to celebrate births or honour guests, and sacrificed on holy days and holidays, with their livers used for divination. As such, its wool grows from a symbolically fertile ground, laden with the weight of mythology, civilisational history, and creationist narratives.
Drawing parallels to the Mayan notion of the world existing on the back of a turtle, Pepe鈥檚 work is grounded in the recognition that a whole ecosystem exists on the backs of animals too. He describes the process of turning a fleece鈥攁 shorn biomass of wool, parasites, insects and plant matter鈥攊nto material, hair into wool, as an extractive process of removing the landscape from it. More recently, he has begun to separate out and classify these elements to create a kind of visual taxonomy of the wool鈥檚 terroir. Using animal collagen and medical grade preservatives, these bits of landscape are tightly bound together into matted expressions of a territory Landscape Matter that are hung on the gallery wall, or looser, fossilised amberlike tiles Vegetable Matter that are displayed on x-ray lightboxes, suggesting a primordial soup of plant matter floating in animal matter. Also on view is a video from the cataloguing process, which navigates the debris using a powerful microscopic lens, moving ever downward to produce a visceral, endoscopic exploration. Taken together, they create a certain forensic aesthetic鈥攖he modern-day organ divination鈥攂ut what is being dissected here is not human flesh so much as the landscape itself.
In summer 2024, Pepe wrapped the Villa des Palmes, a heritage building severely damaged in the Beirut port explosion, in handmade felted wool. Unlike the hermetic seal of a coffin, a shroud is a semi-permeable membrane that allows for the passage of air, moisture, microbes, and the forces of time and here, too, the covering is stretched thin like yuba. In using a material long used to dress wounds, the intervention drew parallels between urban and fleshy bodies, and their different processes of treatment and repair. When we heal a broken structure, we try to restore it to a state of former glory. When we renovate the human body, however, the most we can do is stem the tide of decay. Draped over a building, this single, multi-paneled textile operates like the green or brown safety mesh over scaffolding we might be more used to seeing but unlike the fixity of this netting, the shroud billows and sighs in the breeze, revealing the fragility and vulnerability of the decimated form it covers.
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A shroud is a cloth. A shroud obscures, but it also protects what is underneath. A shroud cradles that which it covers at a time of transition, a transmutation from one state to another. Above all, a shroud is indexical: it says that something once came from the land, was severed from it, and will now be returned to the land. The human that is made of clay and mud returns to clay and mud; ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
A textile is in itself an expression of the landscape it comes from. It has a terroir that is reflected in its texture: the diameter of each strand and its crimp, which in turn affects its softness or coarseness and insulating properties. Among animal fibres, wool is especially remarkable for its ability to absorb moisture without getting wet; put another way, it is uniquely able to not just reflect its terroir, but carry its atmosphere with it. And while we tend to think of terroir as climate, soil composition, and the particular grasses that an animal might eat, we should extend our understanding to other elements, namely the accumulation of culture and history that is as much a part of any terrain as its mineral content.
As the animal grazes, its hair, fur, or wool also accumulates in its surrounding landscape, picking up burrs which have co-evolved to have a commensalistic relationship with the animal that carries and deposits these seeds elsewhere, ensuring biodiversity. Humans, in turn, have manipulated these animal fibres as clothing and as shelter, resulting in morphological changes over time as the body evolves to adapt to new climates. In his textile-based practice, Adrian Pepe primarily works with wool from Awassi sheep, an ancient fat-tailed breed that has been reared in its native Mesopotamia and Levant for over 5000 years. It is the ur-sheep of Abrahamic religions and ritualistic practices, slaughtered to celebrate births or honour guests, and sacrificed on holy days and holidays, with their livers used for divination. As such, its wool grows from a symbolically fertile ground, laden with the weight of mythology, civilisational history, and creationist narratives.
Drawing parallels to the Mayan notion of the world existing on the back of a turtle, Pepe鈥檚 work is grounded in the recognition that a whole ecosystem exists on the backs of animals too. He describes the process of turning a fleece鈥攁 shorn biomass of wool, parasites, insects and plant matter鈥攊nto material, hair into wool, as an extractive process of removing the landscape from it. More recently, he has begun to separate out and classify these elements to create a kind of visual taxonomy of the wool鈥檚 terroir. Using animal collagen and medical grade preservatives, these bits of landscape are tightly bound together into matted expressions of a territory Landscape Matter that are hung on the gallery wall, or looser, fossilised amberlike tiles Vegetable Matter that are displayed on x-ray lightboxes, suggesting a primordial soup of plant matter floating in animal matter. Also on view is a video from the cataloguing process, which navigates the debris using a powerful microscopic lens, moving ever downward to produce a visceral, endoscopic exploration. Taken together, they create a certain forensic aesthetic鈥攖he modern-day organ divination鈥攂ut what is being dissected here is not human flesh so much as the landscape itself.
In summer 2024, Pepe wrapped the Villa des Palmes, a heritage building severely damaged in the Beirut port explosion, in handmade felted wool. Unlike the hermetic seal of a coffin, a shroud is a semi-permeable membrane that allows for the passage of air, moisture, microbes, and the forces of time and here, too, the covering is stretched thin like yuba. In using a material long used to dress wounds, the intervention drew parallels between urban and fleshy bodies, and their different processes of treatment and repair. When we heal a broken structure, we try to restore it to a state of former glory. When we renovate the human body, however, the most we can do is stem the tide of decay. Draped over a building, this single, multi-paneled textile operates like the green or brown safety mesh over scaffolding we might be more used to seeing but unlike the fixity of this netting, the shroud billows and sighs in the breeze, revealing the fragility and vulnerability of the decimated form it covers.
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