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Her work has been featured in a variety of prestigious spaces, including the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, Seattle Center, and Freeway Park, among others. Fetterman has also participated in numerous artist residencies, such as those at the Vermont Studio Center and Franconia Sculpture Park. Her impressive body of work, which includes large-scale, kinetic sculptures, reflects her belief in the physical and emotional intersections of memory, movement, and sculpture. In addition, she is currently the Studio Manager for renowned artist Ginny Ruffner. 

Your work often explores the relationship between movement and memory. How do you see the act of moving through space as central to your creative process?

Our body is our relationship to the world. At �����Ź���, I was making pieces that were large and installed high up, looming over you. It dawned on me later that I wasn’t making large things; I was working from memories of when I was younger, when I was smaller and the world was bigger, when as a six-year-old, the dining room table was an enormous object that stood above you. 

Considering how the viewer will move through space when viewing your artwork allows you to choreograph it. The simple act of making a viewer tilt their head back because they need to look up at your work, that movement in their body, as well as the scale of the art in relation to the body, can evoke deep body memories.

You’ve worked on some incredible large-scale installations, like your 16.5-foot kinetic sculpture at Franconia Sculpture Park. What challenges and rewards come with creating art that people can interact with in such a physical way?

It’s hugely rewarding to see people find their own interactions with your work. It’s the joy of making public art. People can form relationships with your work; it can be their favorite thing on their way to work every day, the place marker for where to meet a friend. The challenges are why I also do other non-interactive pieces. It can feel frustrating to continually have to consider engineering issues, weather effects, and safety issues, particularly for viewers who interact with the artwork in ways you don’t expect, while trying to hear your vision of the work.

Having been a Visiting Artist at �����Ź��� College and currently managing the studio of Ginny Ruffner, what has your experience in mentoring and collaborating with other artists taught you about your own practice?

I remember when I first started working for Ginny, we had a call with the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian. I’d been preparing all day, and when I went downstairs, expecting that she’d been doing the same, I found her playing with little plastic dinosaurs with the excitement of a child. It kind of blew my mind, that someone far along in their career chose to spend their time on joy.

Her work in general was playful, and it gave me permission to indulge my more whimsical and playful ideas. She was a generous mentor to me and that reinforced my own practice of collaboration and teaching.

I loved my time as a visiting artist at �����Ź���. It is so special to see artists “growing up” in their practice in the same place where you did. Being around students reminded me how brilliant emerging artists are. They are starting to find their voice in their work – one of the most vulnerable and raw stages of their entire career. It’s an honor to be invited into that space and to be able to support them in it. It also reignited my interest in re-visiting some of the works I’d made in college to consider how they would change now that I’m a little farther along in my career.

You’ve had the opportunity to work in various artist residencies and public art spaces. How do different environments influence the way you approach your projects and develop new ideas?

Both residencies and public art spaces are a fresh starting place with their own beautiful restrictions. I think of my art studio as the inside of my head. It holds all the thoughts and things I want to make, as well as things I need to work on that I’ve been avoiding. So sometimes it’s essential to leave the studio for a little while. Sometimes it’s just a hike, sometimes it’s a month away at a residency. To start fresh can be so exhilarating. It frees you up to chase whatever impulse or gesture occurs in the moment.

Alternatively, to have a specific public art place where your work will go means a lot of the decisions are made for you before you even get to your studio—is it a wall piece or suspended or does it sit on the ground? Is the backdrop a white wall or a forest? All of these factors are answers to respond to as you start imagining your piece.

Your thoughts about how memory and experience live in the body are fascinating. Can you share how this philosophy shapes the materials and techniques you use in your sculptures?

I work with the materials of my memories, especially of my memories in my grandparents’ home. I didn’t understand this when I was starting out, so I’ve learned that if you are drawn to particular materials, let yourself reach for them. The understanding will follow. 

As far as process, blacksmithing is choreography. When steel becomes hot, it begins to move like clay. When you hammer on one side of a piece of metal, the rest of it reacts, expanding with the displaced hot steel, just like a dancer moving one part of their body and the rest following. I remember when [then technical instructor, now faculty member in Sculpture] John Umphlett introduced us to the idea that welding is sewing. That door has always stayed open for how I think about the media I’m working in.

What do you remember most or carry with you from your time at �����Ź���? And who or what was most influential to you as you shaped your current career?

Former faculty member Jon Isherwood comes to mind immediately. 

A small moment, I was installing a work, Past Selves, that I developed while at Benington at Russell Day Gallery this past February. The piece involves covering the gallery walls in black tar paper. I had installed the piece in the hallway at VAPA, and I remembered Isherwood during a critique saying that I needed to have the black reach to the ceiling, so the viewer's gaze didn’t get stuck at an arbitrary paper line. I’d installed it to a line that I thought made sense at Russell Day Gallery, stepped back, and thought to myself, “Nope, he was right, it’s gotta go to the ceiling.” Having that kind of feedback can seem small, but it was his complete trust and support in my work from the beginning when I felt like I had no idea what I was doing that resonates under it, with the note of fixing a detail so others could feel it in its entirety without distraction.

I have never been someone who plays well within the rules. I chose �����Ź��� for that reason. The College helped me to learn to see the infrastructure presented—for example, the rather restrictive options you are given to show your artwork in the world—and to take a step back, and rather than feeling stuck within them, look beyond them to figure out how to use them to work for me.

What advice do you have for current �����Ź��� students hoping to make careers as artists?

My top four pieces of advice are to build community, try not to live in a scarcity mindset, chase the right opportunities, and finally, if something in your life isn’t working, trust that you can change it. 

My path involved working for older, established artists in the field. This allowed me to see the entire process of making a public artwork, the engineering aspect, budgeting, working with the city or private clients, and so on. So, when it came time to make my own, I knew the engineers, the arborists, the photographers to call. But it also helped get my name out there. 

As the one managing the correspondence with museums and galleries, you get to know these important people in a professional context. Those relationships help enormously. At the same time, I was building my own art community of peers. If you find and make community, you’ll get each other through anything. It’s hard as an artist to not get into a scarcity headspace when you and all your friends are competing for the same grants. But the reality is, if you get that grant, your job, in part, is to raise up those around you. And in turn, they will do the same. So truly, a huge lesson has been that the more you give and the more supportive you can be for those around you, the more abundance will find you.

Chase the opportunities you want with your whole heart. But learn to know the difference between what is a real opportunity that will help you and those around you grow and one that will actually cost and drain you. If you find yourself in the latter, trust that you can walk away and something better will be waiting there for you.