ARTIST'S STATEMENT—
Felice E. Tebbe has been writing since she knew what a sound was, what a letter was.
The words were put down on paper as a loom weaves a blanket, as a stick twists warmth. Her limited vocabulary grew limited innocence, penetrating wisdom through simplicity.
Throughout school, she would buy new books & be pleased when the finished book was worn, tattered. Some called it rudeness or disrespect to the knowledge within, to the structure that holds it. To Felice, it was beauty.
The mark on the street, the scrape in the hallway, the chip in a tooth all told a story, and contained a history.
These marks of wear were what life documented. They spoke of the city streets near where she was raised - the marks of the graffiti; the hidden art in a crack in the sidewalk; the drawing by a child on the cement.
To her, these were poems that would soon wash away.She started documenting people & their faces. Then she moved to the marks that a life creates while it is lived, the mark the individual creates just by being alive.
It speaks of an impermanence of space, the movement of time.
This movement, having come from a family of filmmakers, was slower for Felice. She always walked in the back of the crowd, so that she could watch figures as they move. Her eyes, her memory, move at her own pace.This pace is mimicked when one turns the page of her writing, this movement delivers the story. Images pull the reader through the work. They make one to pause & behold. This pausing & seeing is what Felice has done throughout her existence.
This honest observing creates a space that is different for every person.
These are the gifts to her loved ones, and to the public, for them to see & pause by.
Once in a museum, Felice was gazing into, a painting. The Germans all stroke in the same way –long & thin. An older man, hunched over, came up surprisingly close to Felice, and asked, “What do you see?” She turned hastily to the man, and replied, “Nothing, absolutely nothing.” The man paused on Felice’s face & recognized that they mutually understood that the narrow space and the bright color in the painting housed a kind of critical pause.
Somewhere in this pause was a truth.Felice always defines what she makes as gifts - Dedicated to all or to no one, but, usually to a friend, a family member, or a flicker of a memory, a click of time. Felice collects the patina of having been in her images & sewing of words (just as the hands of a binder moves through the air in front of & above one’s head).
© 2006 by Felix Press. All rights reserved.