Lydia Pepi graduated from Bard College with a BA in studio arts in 2018. She was a 2019 Elizabeth Greenshield grant recipient and currently lives in Portland, Maine
lydia.pepi@gmail.com
My work as a still life oil painter builds off the prodigious history of still life in representing the everyday. A level of investigation is required of the viewer when looking at still life, to begin to understand the symbolism at play; whether about wealth and value, or morality and mortality. In this way still life can become a mechanism for using the routine and familiar -- or what we believe to be fully known to us --, to generate new understanding through slow and careful observation.
My tabletop still lifes observe our tendency to overlook the everyday functioning of our bodies. This is explored in the moments where cellular forms emerge from the fabric or fruit and move across the table amongst flowers and bowls. The placement of subtle anatomies into the still life is in pursuit of creating familiarity with them, to remind ourselves of the likeness and shared vulnerability. So we can begin to see plasma cells in the paisley or bone tissue cells in the running lines of the fabric. Or, that in this looking we might notice the inside of cantaloupes and peppers mimic our own.
More recent works explore the Forest Floor still life tradition, which in the 17th century documented the then-called “inferior creatures” among the plants and decay of the forest floor. Four centuries later, natural and scientific knowledge has accumulated, and our state of separation from nature has only grown. Through the homes we build, to the insulated lives we live, to the clean, white space of the gallery. For many, the small creatures and life of the forest floor still inspire fear and repulsion.
All of my still lifes observe culturally constructed boundaries. Boundaries that split the body and the mind, human and lived space, natural environments and civilization. They seek to illustrate these boundaries are false. Calling attention to the sense that humanity is separate, when in truth it is inextricable from nature. The stark contrast of food and human-made objects introduced into perfect pockets of forest floor frame a normal encounter of the natural with the allegedly distant human-made material. However, nature's inevitable power to obscure and decay shows the boundary between the two is permeable, if not nonexistent. As with our bodies, the division between the self and our own anatomy is only razor thin.
