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’s 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—a shorn biomass of wool, parasites, insects and plant matter—into 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’s 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—the modern-day organ divination—but 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.  

 

At NIKA, this monumental 200 square meter textile is hung in the anterior space, greeting visitors as they enter the space to form the heart of the show. Removed from the building-as-corpse, it invokes the living bodies that it once originated from, with each panel using approximately the amount of wool produced by a single sheep. Yet installed in a white cube, the shroud doesn’t suggest a return to the earth, to the landscape, so much as the cold clinicality of the mortuary. Moving from the shroud towards the shroud, main space then, creates an unsettling play on scale as the visitor moves from product to representations of the landscape it is extracted from. 

 

As for the absent body that the shroud intimates. It has already made its way upstairs, in the form of Shedding (2023), a life-sized cast of the artist’s body, laid out on a morguelike slab. The piece is the aftermath—an afterbirth as well as a shroud — of a 12-hour durational performance in which performers clad in disposable blue hazmat suits wet and felted wool directly onto Pepe’s body in an exploration of funerary rites and a millennia-long history ovine-human symbiosis. This shedded snakeskin analogue reverberates across floors in the jute netting that used to sag and fall off a building in Pepe’s Beirut neighbourhood like scabs. They are sutured together with felted wool in a series of works Urban Shrouds that further collapses the distance between shroud and safety textiles, and between the urban and human bodies. 

The transformative process of healing is further viscerally intimated in works Ex Votos that references childhood memories of Pepe’s father’s orthopedic clinic, as well as a Costa Rican pilgrimage tradition. Both are ritualised sites of profound faith and a very human yearning for repair, whether in the sympathetic magic of a basilica Chamber of Miracles, or the performed rationality of modern medicine. At the end of the pilgrimage, devotees make small golden and silver medallions depicting ailing body parts which are hung on a particular wall as a way to ask for improved health or another boon, or mounted in gratitude for healing, or another benediction received. But here, human body parts are interspersed with animal ones, suggesting a kind of hybrid interspecies structuring. There is an understanding here that healing must necessarily be collective—we can’t get better alone—but also, fascinatingly, might require the built environment too. As a whole, the show suggests the locavorist maxim that what grows together grows together. The “three sisters” of corn, beans, and squash, for example, or tomatoes, eggplants and zucchinis. Or more precisely, what grows together should be shown together: shrouded, shed, and finally stitched together.

– Rahel Aima