Etel Adnan’s tapestry, Forêt, executed in 2019, envelops its viewer in a densely woven forest of greens, blues and browns that transform into abstracted trunks and branches swaying gently across the picture plane. Throughout, dappled flashes of red and yellow create a warm sense of light in the otherwise cool palette, evoking that liminal space between the changing of the seasons.
With a multi-hyphenate career as an internationally celebrated poet, philosopher, journalist and painter, Adnan, who is Lebanese-American, began weaving wool tapestries in the early 1960s to capture the feeling and palette of the Persian rugs of her childhood. Where her written work focuses on the outer world, with countless publications on geopolitical events such as the Lebanese Civil War, her visual artworks instead turn inwards, expressing a knowledge that goes beyond words. In an interview from 2014, the artist describes how “places act on us like the quality of the water affects fish. Places are part of nature, of the bigger picture. We are interrelated. When we contemplate them in their own right, they can sometimes change our lives, they can become spiritual experiences. In my case, they become part of the poetry I write, or, certainly, my painting.”i Forêt, which translates from French to “Forest”, evokes a heightened sense of faith in the peaceful, persistent hope of nature.
While Adnan’s tapestries recall the brushstrokes and palette of her paintings, none of her designs are translated or copied from her canvases but rather stand alone as their own body of work. During her 2012 exhibition at dOCUMENTA(13) in Kassel, Adnan displayed a sole tapestry in the middle of the room surrounded by thirty-eight paintings, establishing woven wools as a key medium within her expansive practice. Her tapestries have since been exhibited widely, from the Whitney’s 2014 Biennale to the Guggenheim’s retrospective of her work, Etel Adan: Light’s New Measure (2022). Forêt is a strikingly serene example of Adnan’s visual poetry, visualizing a forest that remains tangible to us and yet just out of reach.