Artist Susan Fecho’s “No Thought of Time” exhibition is on view through Dec. 20 at the Arthur S. DeBerry Gallery for Botanical Art & Illustration, located in the Pegg Exhibit Hall of the North Carolina Botanical Garden in Chapel Hill.
Fecho is a professor of art in the School of Arts and Humanities at Barton College and a renowned artist of regional, national and international recognition. Working from collected specimens — fragments of nature and found objects, she has produced landscapes that simultaneously celebrate nature and reference civilization. Progressing from realism to the abstract, using textural layering, collage and muted values, she aims to create subtle tones of “place memory” where discontinuous times and places become interactive.
Fecho uses intentional and chance methods to record nature and to understand that nature does not transcend culture, nor do the traces of the human within the land. This exhibit began with a series of small woodblocks and lino blocks that she developed and then repeated to a larger scale by printing on toned washi paper, then collaged all together and augmented with watercolor, gouache and silverpoint pieces.