Reviews:
“Fecho’s best, most haunting work draws on the deep well of familial, historical, symbolic memory for inspiration and imagery. Not only is memory a theme of these works, viewing them stimulates the memory making process whereby discontinuous times and places become interactive. In the use of collage, textural layering, muted values, the images convey Fecho’s sense that two-dimensional work, like poetry…deals in meanings conditioned by emotion. Fecho speaks with a clearly female idiom. Soft washes veil the print’s surface. But, in Blueberry Bush, it is the enigmatic face of the woman peering from within her window that gives the piece its haunting feel - as though the artist has, for a moment, lifted the veil on herself and emerged onto the surface of her work.” Dr. Elaine Marshall, Professor of English,
“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, and 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,
