Sherry Stanley
Born 1961
Sherry Stanley has practiced at Creative Growth since 2014 and works in many media, including painting and drawing, ceramic, wood, and textiles. She works diligently on her creations, using reference material in combination with her own personal imagery to create her appealing compositions.
ABOUT SHERRY STANLEY’S WINDOW INSTALLATION FOR THE 2023 HOME SHOW
When Sherry Stanley was invited to create an installation for our Home Show exhibition in a window box, the vision for the project came to her immediately. With the support of her dear friend and studio facilitator, Amy Keefer, the two designed and installed a life-size representation of Sherry's fondest childhood memory.
Photographs of bricks were reproduced with the studio's risograph to recreate the fireplace of her grandmother's living room. Perched on a tiny chair formed from cardboard and painted blue, knitting needles and yarn recall the artist's early lessons in knitting. At the base of the structure, an intricate freestyle weaving of fiery hues, woven on a Saori loom, warms the hearth. Additional weavings are sewn into tonal stripe pillows resting on each side of the fireplace. It's an invitation for us to take a front-row seat to the real and imagined chapters of Sherry's story.
The warmth of the piece emanates from the multiple artistic representations of the home therein, placed on the mantle and walls that surround the brick facade. For almost a decade, Sherry has created paintings and layered assemblages on canvas with sequins and beads to create intricate designs that give texture and form to the various renderings of houses. With wood and clay, she assembles reinforced walls, painted and open windows, enclosed porches, and long entryways leading to the door of the structures. Several of the ceramic and wooden pieces have removable roofs that reveal a diorama of a habitable living space. Similar to the three-dimensional figures, the painted, molded, and assembled pieces in the installation make us privy to Sherry's internal world where she fuses together personal narratives and fantasy.
While Sherry never lived in the woods nor a log cabin, the imagery and setting in each piece are intended to evoke a sense of strength and safety, a protected solid structure enveloped by the vastness of a quiet and bucolic space. Alongside the depictions of fantasy, the homes and places where she would have wanted to live, Sherry references the last home she shared with her parents. Mounted to the left of the fireplace, Sherry's vertical arrangement of elongated blue plastic beads recalls the exterior of the blue house that she and her brother ran from to escape the parents' chaos. Patterns of colored sequins detail curtains hanging from the three windows and door. As the eye moves to the right, centered on the hearth, we see painted onto a wooden circular form the transitional facility where she would spend the next two and a half years of her early adolescence. The artist's story continues as our eye moves right and lands on the house made of brilliantly colored silver, black, and gold beads horizontally oriented to mimic the home of her adoptive family.
Mama Sherry, as she is known among her chosen family at Creative Growth Art Center, recognizes that "not everyone has a home, and most can recall the feeling of a home." Sherry dedicates this installation to the unhoused.
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS