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03/20/2024 08:30 AMSally Stamos describes her work table as like grandma’s attic. That is, of course, if grandma’s attic had pencils, pens, snippets of fabrics and wallpaper, glitter, yarn, and a heat tool among its assorted contents.
Sally’s artwork contains all of those ingredients and more.
“It’s mixed media,” she explains.
Sally’s inventive approach to making art will be on display at the Chester Historical Society’s upcoming fundraiser, the Creative Challenge, on Saturday, March 23 from 5 to 7 p.m. at the Chester Meeting House.
The challenge is to fashion an inventive creation from whatever kind of material the society has provided. This year’s challenge, Watch Out!, features antique watch crystals, which participants can incorporate into an original piece in whatever way they wish.
In many instances, previous challenges have used objects once made by now-gone local manufacturers in Chester, among them hooks from the Brooks factory, knitting gauges from C.J. Bates and Son, and manicure sticks from the Bishop and Watrous Novelty Works.
The creations are not simply to admire. There is a silent auction for all of them.
Sally, who moved to Chester four years ago, has already participated in the event.
“I love bringing meaning to the objects,” she says.
On one occasion, Sally made a puffy, flower-like construction and, while she was working on it, she opened her window and found a dead bee. Sally mounted the bee on the floral creation with the slogan, “Bees are the keys to the future.”
One day, on her regular walk, a woman stopped Sally and asked if her last name was Stamos. When Sally replied, ‘Yes,’ the woman told her that she had bid and won Sally’s bee creation.
“She told me she loved it. She was mad for it,” Sally recalls.
Sally’s artistic creations demonstrated her inventive streak from an early age.
“Mom let us dabble,” she says.
Sally used her mother’s iron to make batik prints on wax.
“Mom got a new iron,” she adds. “She always let experiment. I was always exploring, creating.”
Still, when it came to college, Sally, who was born in Hartford and grew up in Wethersfield, chose home economics.
Sally says that she “loved to cook,” particularly baking. She remembers creating fancy French pastries as an early teen.
“Crazy combinations. French puff pastries,” she says.
Despite a college major in nutrition, Sally took a job in sales after graduation and now works in customer service in New Britain. However, Sally has “always had a side hustle,” as she describes it, and that has always involved art. She has painted furniture, done collages, worked with fiber, and, after taking a silversmithing class, made jewelry.
However, working with silver was not Sally’s style.
“I made beautiful pieces, but in the end, the silver was gray, hard, and cold,” she says. “Playing with color and texture—that is my thing.
One collage that Sally showed a visitor exhibited her style at its peak. At first, the work looks like a painting, but closer inspection of the street scene reveals everything from fabric to a small cameo used in a clock tower, a crescent of moon that is actually picture of a lock of hair, and a piece of rusted metal that Sally found on a walk sewn to the fabric as a cloud.
Sally has had her work in juried shows in Hartford and other galleries in Connecticut. Also, for several years, she has contributed to the Chester Gallery for its annual postcard show.
Now, Sally is turning some of her collages into prints with a photographer who uses high-resolution imagery.
“It’s archival ink, archival paper. Not just a Xerox,” she says.
When Sally and her husband Bruce Caron moved to Chester four years ago, they found that furnishing their new house could be a problem. That’s because the pandemic made it difficult to go into stores to buy furniture.
Instead, they found things on Facebook Marketplace and created their living space on their own.
“He’s Chip to my Jo,” Sally explains, referring to a popular home renovating couple on HGTV.
Sally used the skills she had employed in her art to paint walls. Rather than doing so with simply one color of paint, she made subtle patterns designed to look like wallpaper. Sally has tiled a small section of floor at their entrance way. The hallway itself is painted with wide light blue and white stripes that Sally continued into the closet.
“I couldn’t stop myself,” she says. “I love fixing up houses.”
Upstairs, Sally has something commonplace in a dance studio, but not a bedroom: a tap dance floor. She had done tap dancing from the age of 5 to 25. Now, over 30 years later, Sally has returned to it after seeing an advertisement for a studio in Middletown.
“It was like a language I hadn’t forgotten,” she says. “I came back, and it felt like I had never left.”
Sally had once considered a career in dance, but she wasn’t really ready for it at the time.
“I had offers for auditions in New York, but I chickened out,” she says. “I lost guts. I couldn’t move to New York when I was 17 or 18.”
Sally is looking forward to the Creative Challenge evening at the Chester Meeting House. Tickets for the event cost $30 and will be sold at the door.
“It’s interesting to see the take other people have on the very same thing,” she says. “That’s what is great about art.”