Susan Fecho, a Professor of Art at Barton College, has shown in 25 solo exhibitions and over a hundred invitationals. Fecho’s published images have been accepted into several major collections: the Smithsonian Institution’s American Art Museum/National Portrait Gallery Library, Washington, D.C.; the Word and Image Department, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England; and the Museum of Women Artists, Washington, D.C. Fecho is a multi-media printmaker/surface designer with an earned M.F.A. from East Carolina University as well as postgraduate studies from various institutions including; Jan Van Eyck Academie, Humboldt Field Research Institute, Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, Northern Illinois University and Penland School of Crafts. She has exhibited regionally, nationally and internationally – and has received numerous awards, grants and residencies.

Artist Statement

“My work interprets the past as a personal, cultural, and archetypal artifact. The human body, architectural unit, and surrounding landscape become metaphors in my work. Trained as a traditional printmaker, I am intrigued by the richness and variety inherent in varied techniques. Storytelling is at the core of my work, with the sculptural book as a mode of telling stories, expressing feelings, and sharing imagery. Through my work the familiar reappears in unfamiliar configurations; a new sense of significance is imparted to an otherwise everyday object. My creative interests extend beyond the viewed subject, encompassing sculptural elements, allegorical imagery, and whimsical puns. In my work, there are varied layers of material and multiple facets of meaning.

Reviews:

“Fecho’s memories on paper are archetypal. It’s not just a personal memory as such, but more of an intrinsic type of memory that we store that might conjure up a past moment. They are images that allow the viewer her/his own personal recalled moments.” Jane Kessler, independent curator, writer and founder of the Curator’ Forum of Charlotte, NC.

“The spirit of Susan Fecho’s work is most easily identified, with the abandoned homeplace, the deserted front porch… a ghost of friends, family, relationships that is universal. Her work, personal and introspective, is like a journal or diary in which an object is often a representation of self or of viewer. Chairs, rooms, stairways, are all images of things vacated…but not empty. Poetic and lyrical, there is a hint of apparition in her work. The body is gone but here is a residue, memory; something stays behind that keeps these images from being sterile representation of spaces. Fecho revisits ideas and actual places. Pieces are never static but continue to evolve and change. Both hand and mind manipulate, gather, reshape in effort to preserve and also to open a door or a window for the viewer.” Meade B. Horne, past director of the Blount Bridgers Museum, Tarboro, NC

“There is- some artist’s beliefs to the contrary- a great deal of subject matter better suited to the miniature than the gigantic. Proof lies in works of Susan Fecho. Her miniatures are finely etched mood pieces suggesting life and memory, evoking imagined sounds and emotion. They are as intimate as chamber music… and as moving. What makes them work- evoking mood, combining the emptiness of desertion with whispering of past laughter, cries, footsteps of human habitation – is that the “rooms” are fragmented. This series is finely crafted by an artist who knows that suggestion is frequently more powerful than reality. She also obviously knows the value of angles and conveying lines to convey mood.” Richard Schqarze of the Times Publication, Kettering, Ohio.