Tebbenhoff has been a Fellow of the Royal British Society of Sculptors since 2002 and has exhibited widely in Britain and Europe - she created the ‘Star of London’ award for the BFI Film Festival in 2009 and public works in Chiswick Park, Leicester University Library and St George’s Hospital, London.
The daughter of a hobby blacksmith, Tebbenhoff came to England to study ceramics at the Sir John Cass School of art, aged 18, in 1969. For over 10 years, she worked in clay and wood but it was a two-year course in metal fabrication at South Thames College, London that really lit her fires. Steel became her main material for the next two decades. Her early pieces were monochrome - mostly grey - abstract explorations of space and volume through geometric devices.
Then, in 2006, she was offered a scholarship to learn to carve marble in Pietrasanta, Italy. Nowadays she uses both materials with departures into wax for casting in bronze.
Her explosive forms, sometimes in bright colours, investigate themes of light, space and the origins of matter.
She is inspired by process and enjoys the way objects of beauty and intrigue can emerge from a noisy session cutting and welding steel, or from a quieter but no less messy afternoon pushing and pummelling wet clay.