Ritual, Reclamation and Resurrection
Artist Adrian Pepe’s work reflects on the ancient symbiotic relationship between man and animal.
By India Stoughton
PHOTOGRAPH BY MARIE RAVN
Adrian Pepe knows his subject inside out—from entrails to epidermis. Initially attracted by the artistic potential of the fat-tailed Awassi sheep’s dense fleece, the fibre artist has spent eight years researching the animal’s 5,000-year history in the Arab region, its enduring symbiotic relationship with humans and the symbolic role it plays in the stories that have shaped the moral codes of the modern world.
Born in Honduras in 1984, Pepe has led a nomadic life, living in Europe, Africa, and the US, where he briefly studied architecture before switching to a “very strange” degree programme called Fibres at the Savannah College of Art and Design. His first solo show was an installation and performance piece in which he explored “not just animal fibres or plant fibres that are commercialised, but the fibres of the human—kind of flipping the narrative of the commercialisation of another sentient being’s biomass to one of ours.”
The entire exhibition was made from human hair. Locks were displayed like scientific specimens around the walls of the gallery, but the main focus was a bleached, roughly felted bedspread that resembled an animal pelt. Pepe would later go on to make an inverse version of this work, creating intricately braided sheepskins that evoke the rituals of human grooming, drawing close parallels between human and animal and questioning their taxonomy. “We define ourselves based on what we’re not—which is animal—and then at the same time we are animals,” he says. “A lot of my work blurs this line of human animality and animal humanness.”
Wak-Wak A population of people perpetually propagating from a single tree. The bodies birthed from the tree fall upon ripening, waking to reality and screaming the piercing cry of the newborn.
In 2015, Pepe moved to Lebanon to run Bokja, a Beirut design studio that creates furniture and fashion characterised by bold textiles and intricate embroidery. He searched for ways to understand the country through its indigenous fibres. On long hikes in the mountains, he noticed shepherds traversing the landscape with their flocks of cream and brown sheep. Attracted by the potential of the animals’ thick, shaggy fleeces, he began to research the Awassi, finding that it originated in the Syro-Arabian desert and had played a formative role in the economies of the world’s oldest city states. “The first moment that you see the sheep documented is in Mesopotamian and Sumerian artefacts, where you see already the depiction of the sheep with its fat tail,” he says.
Working with natural Awassi fibres proved more difficult than he had anticipated. Once a treasured resource, Awassi wool is too coarse to make into clothing, and is better suited for carpentry or stuffing. Today it is often thrown away or buried after the sheep are sheared. Bisat al Rih, a women’s cooperative in Arsal, in the north of Lebanon, is one of very few businesses still working with the ancient material. The women there, who weave it into carpets, taught Pepe the painstaking process of cleaning and processing the fleece, an undertaking that today is often outsourced to China or done using machines in commercial industries, but which Pepe does by hand.
At the same time, he delved into researching the relationship between man and sheep. “I started to be a lot more interested in the animal, not just understanding how it was used within material culture, but also how it was integrated into the ethical codes that we see within Abrahamic religions,” he says. “You see it a lot more with Judaism and Islam, where you have this notion of sacrifice.” Even in Christianity, “there’s always this pedestal quality of the sheep,” he says. “Within the Bible, specifically, you see constant mentions of the sheep as analogous of the moral person.”
Pepe participated in the second Sharjah Architecture Triennial. His site-specific installation, Utility of Being: A Paradox of Proximity, was staged in a former abattoir. A fitting location for a work made of the pelts of the fat-tailed Awassi sheep, and whose tubular forms echoed the shapes of animal entrails. Photo: Danko Stjepanovic Courtesy of Sharjah Architecture Triennial Foundation.
Pepe’s research has yielded a rich body of work based on Awassi wool and the sheep’s cultural significance. Among his most sought-after works are Braidings, a series of intricately plaited sheepskins that explore the evolving tradition of human hair grooming, and The First Red, a collection of circular felted works dyed a warm golden colour using natural ochre pigment. These works were inspired by the “yellow polka dots” daubed onto sheep by shepherds in Lebanon to mark their herds. “The first instances where you see the use of this colour is in cave paintings,” Pepe says, noting that it is thought to be the first pigment ever used, dating back more than 20,000 years. “In order to extract this colour, there needed to be tools, so it was quite an innovation to see the use of this colour within the first images.”
Echoing the earliest human experiments with fibre and textile, in Entangled Matters, a series of complex tapestries, exhibited at Beirut’s Agial Art Gallery in 2021, he combined felting with braiding and embroidery, highlighting the natural versatility of the wool and its capacity for transformation. Several works featured imagery of plants, delicately embroidered in gold silk thread. These pieces were inspired by the laborious process of preparing the wool, during which Pepe came across seeds that have evolved to migrate and propagate by attaching themselves to animals, highlighting the role of nomadic flocks in nurturing the landscape, a process that has been “lost from the communal memory.”
Soon afterwards, Pepe’s work was catapulted in a new direction after he found himself captivated by a bas-relief at the British Museum. The gypsum carving showed an Assyrian warrior swimming across a river with the aid of an airtight sack made from tightly sewn animal skins. Suddenly, the artist found himself preoccupied with the capacity of the animal body to hold, carry, and contain.
Pepe was taught the painstaking process of preparing the coarse wool, which he does by hand.
Around this time, he was invited to prepare an installation for the Sharjah Architecture Triennial. “At that point, I had been obsessed with this notion of inflating animal body parts,” he recalls. An initial idea to use the skins of Awassi sheep to create a bouncy castle morphed into something more sombre when he was offered a former slaughterhouse as the location for his exhibition. Instead, he decided “to place the animal at the forefront of the story.”
Working with an expert at Lebanon’s sole remaining tannery and using the byproducts of sheep killed for their meat, Pepe and his team processed the cured skins of 700 animals. As they worked, they gave each one a name, inscribing it on the back of each hide before stitching them together to form wide, wool-covered tubes. “We wanted the animal to be present in a way that related to the space,” he explains. “The idea was to bring these tubes and essentially let this place of trauma become this point of reclamation.”
In the former abattoir, Pepe suspended the fluffy cylinders from the hooks once used to hang slaughtered animals, forcing visitors to brush against them as they moved through the maze-like space. Sinuously coiled throughout the venue, the tubes were inflated with a continuous current of air, evoking intestines but also lungs—or HVAC ducts—creating a tension between interior and exterior, ancient and contemporary, death and resurrection.
Pepe’s preoccupation with resurrection and metamorphosis is a common thread that binds his work, spanning tapestry, installation and even performance. During a recent residency in Riyadh, the artist asked colleagues to encase his body within a cocoon of wool, which was felted onto his skin over the course of 12 hours to create a life-sized cast, evoking a funeral ritual. “It’s kind of like a mummification process, in a way. However, at the end of it as the wool was felted onto my body, I had to emerge from it and then you have what is essentially my first portrait,” he says. Exploring the idea of rebirth, the work exemplifies the artist’s ability to find new messages and modes of expression within the Awassi’s wool, ensuring that a vanishing resource takes on new forms of contemporary relevance.
Braidings analyses the cultural act of hair braiding. An ancient cultural tradition, it takes different shapes and delineates tribes. As a symbol of human activity, braiding wool redefines what is considered human by interlacing it with animality.
Art images courtesy of Adrian Pepe
