Beverly Pepper, Longo Monolith, 2008, Todi © Beverly Pepper Studio

The writers Andrianna Campbell and Annie Godfrey Larmon joined us at the Studios to develop a research project titled Spoleto: if (s)he spoke without 450 corrections. They are now developing a manuscript for a related book that will focus on the work of David Smith and Beverly Pepper. Both artists were featured in the famous ‘Sculture nella Città’ exhibition at the 1962 Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto, curated by Giovanni Carandente.

Their first-hand research involved studying a number of archives in the town and they also carried out interviews with Beverly Pepper who still lives and works in Umbria. On this page, Campbell and Godfrey Larmon describe their project in detail and share an excerpt from an interview with Pepper.

Beverly Pepper’s studio at Todi © Beverly Pepper Studio

An excerpt from an interview with Beverly Pepper, held in July 2017 at her studio in Todi, Umbria. 

Beverly Pepper: You learn more by making mistakes than you do by getting ahead. I don’t know if you agree, but I think the mistakes point out what you shouldn’t do. Sometimes you go on making the same mistake for a very long time before you wake up and discover you’re on the wrong train.

I think the most important thing for me as an artist is to be free, and I mean free to make a mistake, free to change it. I remember when I was a little girl my mother chastised me for something, I can’t remember what, and she said, “Why do you do this? Why do you do this all the time?” And I said to her, “I want to be free”. I was 10 or 12. My mother started to cry — I’d never seen her crying — and she said, “We all want to be free, even I want to be free”.

I never knew that I would have that answer. It never occurred to me. But you know, we don’t really know ourselves until we’re asked questions and then you have to dig deep to find out who you are. I don’t think you should always know who you are. I think one of the things about being an artist is that you’re always looking: whether you’re looking for yourself, or for something else.

It’s very hard to know who you are as an artist because part of being an artist is being able to take your mistakes — or rather your change in judgment — and go forth. It’s important, particularly early in your career, that you’re not wedded to something you’ve already done. That’s the worst thing that a young artist can do. I’m a creative artist and I can’t have the luxury of saying today is that, tomorrow is that, and the day after tomorrow is this: I think each thing should have the memory of the one just before it and that one mustn’t dissect one’s work until you’re as close to finishing it as possible. There are so many roads to everything. It would be very confusing if you always say, “I have a choice between this and this”. You don’t have a choice: you are either this or that. But don’t get the idea that I or anybody else thinks all this out — this kind of dialect comes after you’ve made work, not before. You’re not talking to yourself because you want a road map. You’re talking to yourself because you want to have a credible in-built shit-kicker. You’re not credible if you’re accepting everything.

If you are working on something — and I’ve had this happen not infrequently —and you look and you look and something is bothering you, you take it to bed with you and come back the next day and try it again. The trick then is not to be wedded to what you were doing before, because it looked quite good: you have to also be committed to change. And that’s the hardest thing. I know early in my career I would do something that looked terrific and I would keep going and going until it was finished and by the time it was finished the soul was gone, because I knew everything I was doing and I’d kept going and going. I am a very strong believer in the unconscious. I think you can learn more from your unconscious than practically anything and it takes you on a voyage that you don’t even plan so you have new experiences. I try not to ask myself too many questions because, if you have all the answers before you make the work, there is no place to go.

But you learn this, all this, as you get older. Now, you know, I’m an old lady. But with great good luck I don’t feel like an old lady, I just know the dates. There is so much self-discipline in being an artist, but most people have this fantasy about an artist floating and doing what they want. If you don’t have major self-discipline you cannot make good art. You have to know, when you’re looking at something, “that just doesn’t go”, just because it looks pretty. It just doesn’t go, so its got to go — and I’ve been working on it three weeks to get to that point! But you have to be brave to throw it away. And you don’t even have to know. It has to be part of your DNA. It’s very interesting.