Palingenesis, meaning one element seeds the next, is a 227-foot-long landscape sculpture.  The theme of Palingenesis is of one element born from another, expressed by a sequence of vertical elements that gradually separate from a wall that generates them. The vertical elements progressively become detached from their context as children individualize themselves from a parent. These themes of genesis and continuity are central to Pepper’s iconography. 

Each vertical element, which marks the 200-foot-long, curved processional wall articulated in a solemn and rhythmic progression, is developed from the preceding column. Gradually, the seventeen vertical markers disengage themselves from the curving wall until the last seven are freestanding within the space of the curved enclosure, at increasing distances from it. After the midpoint, the verticals are no longer engaged columns wed to their originating wall, but detached sculptures, declaring their own independence and autonomy from any confinement, even that of gentle embrace.

The wall itself ends in one of Pepper’s characteristic grass-filled triangles, a rapidly sloping hill that becomes an inviting, grassy terrace. The retaining wall is made up of fifty-nine sections of cast iron. Each of these sections can be seen as a separate relief that Pepper has painstakingly worked by hand, first in plaster, then in cast iron, so that the surface ripples and seems to change as the sun casts its shadow at different times of the day. This effect is planned; the passage of time is part of the content of the work, as are the dramatic chiaroscuro effects of the painterly, tactile surface.

Like the relief panels in Filiate Walls and the ceramic tiles of Cel Caigut, the irregular, hand-worked surfaces of the Palingenesis wall suggest the random movements of both sea and sky. Pepper maintains that when the work is read from left to right, it connotes the birth of new forms from the previous element as it morphs into the next. If the eye reverses course to read from right to left, the effect is as if remembering what has been seen. In Palingenesis, as in Teatro Celle, the idea of antiquity refers not to the cultural forms of the ancients but to the natural forms of prehistoric geological time. The earth berms contained by the irregular cast-iron reliefs are mysterious apparitions that suddenly rise from the ground like the mysterious ziggurats, Druid enclosures, and other sacred places that speak of rituals we do not know. The surfaces, as they rust, become equally enigmatic. Where were these totems made, by whom, and for what? The sense that they have been eroded by eons of natural changes, as water shaped the earth in Biblical times, is part of their look and feel, not of newness, but of experience.

The heart of the matter for Pepper is the relationship of the revealed to the concealed, of the mass to the silhouette, of the solid to the void, of exterior to interior. This is as true for her landscape environments as it is for her individual sculptures. Her interpretation of these themes recalls the dialogue between art and architecture rather than the counterpoint expressed by Henry Moore’s solids versus voids.

Because Pepper’s thinking was essentially formed in Paris in the aura of Malraux, who shared views about simultaneous availability with the expatriate French art historian Henri Focillon, author of The Life of Forms in Art, and his student George Kubler, who carried the concepts farther in The Shape of Time, Pepper was well-prepared for a concept of cultural renewal that was global rather than local, and which took into consideration the interaction between personal style, psychology, and their historic contexts, which variously helped or hindered differing varieties of talent. Chronologically, she is a member of the second generation of the New York School, who worked at a time when serious artists considered public art a compromise no one should make. Fortunately, she has lived long enough to experience the moment in which her own skills and talent as a sculptor of large-scale environmental landscape works have found a patronage base. It is a moment that artists like Constantin Brancusi, Isamu Noguchi, and Tony Smith, who might finally have realized their lifelong dreams to make a spiritually inspired “art for the people,” did not live to see.

It takes a rare studio artist to want to engage with the real world of engineering and landscape, but Pepper is her own kind of anomaly. Success has given her confidence, but not self-satisfaction; she is still pursued by demons that force her to charge ahead into unknown territory, often heedless of the risks. Her fearless curiosity and restlessness have, on occasion, caused her to risk her life in pursuit of a dangerous art adventure. This fearlessness and appetite for challenge create a kind of demon that she flees not by looking back but by plunging ahead, deliberately ignoring the risks she is taking.  Courage and daring are so intrinsic to her character she takes these qualities for granted, as if unaware of their uniqueness in our conformist, timid time.

Pepper’s hands are stained with the acid she uses to patina her sculpture. There is still a fleck in her eye where a piece of steel landed while she was working in a factory. There are days when she is distraught, exhausted, empty, but soon she is filled again with new ideas, projects, and enthusiasm. On her way back to Todi from a raid on the local building supply warehouse, she stops by a nursery. The season is changing, and there are new seeds to be planted.

Beverly Pepper: Three Site-Specific Sculptures, by Barbara Rose, 1998.