Sara Saltee’s Enchanting Little Worlds
In Sara Saltee’s assemblage art boxes, everyday objects are transformed into provocative and uplifting three-dimensional poems.
Using mostly thrifted and vintage ephemera, Sara adds layers of papers, paints, beads, glitter, and lettering to develop amusing, mysterious, and always deeply meaningful scenes that explore themes of identity, nurturance, freedom, and creativity.
Sara has been making shrines and assemblages in boxes for more than 20 years, and remains endlessly captivated by the deep play of her studio work. She shows her work at art fairs and studio tours primarily on Whidbey Island, Washington, where she lives.
In the Art Shop you’ll find a small collection of Sara’s original artworks for sale, along with posters, cards, and Sara’s annual calendars.
Sara’s artwork is represented by the Rob Schouten Gallery in Langley, Washington. Please stop by or visit the gallery website to discover additional original works for sale.
Be sure to check out the Events page for upcoming shows and workshops.
“Arrange whatever pieces come your way.” - Virginia Woolf
As a self-taught assemblage artist, I have taken Virginia Woolf’s words to heart as the First Commandment of my work. Arranging harmonious little worlds out of the random bits of flotsam and jetsam that float through everyday life is, for me, a process so deeply satisfying and joyful that I’ve been hooked on it for over twenty years.
Inspirations & Process
Growing up in New Mexico, I absorbed deep visual impressions of Mexican folk art retablos and nichos. I combine this love of rustic, folky, colorful and sacred art with my un-religious idiosyncratic inquiry into what it is that feels sacred to me.
My shrines and boxes sometimes begin with a central object, but most often begin with the words – a quote, poem fragment, lyric, or found snippets of text that my bookworm-self pulls from the worlds of stories, words and ideas. Once I find some words to spark a direction, I turn the project over to my crow-self who is drawn to shiny objects, bright colors, and intriguing textures. She begins sifting through my (vast, always verging on unmanageable) assortment of papers, objects, and ephemera, searching for materials that bring to life the feelings and imagery the words inspire in me.
I work slowly and intutively, gathering a bunch of possible elements, auditioning them, taking away the stuff that doesn’t quite work, adding layers, exploring possibilities, etc. This mixed-media cha-cha: putting things in place, taking them away, putting them back, taking them away is a dance that can go on for many days!
The role of art in my life
I came to art-making as a daily practice in my late twenties and early thirties, first as a way to lift myself out of depression, and then as a way to maintain my well-being and engage feelings and perceptions that aren’t easily expressed in words alone.
Art-making, for me, is not so much as a “thing I do” but as a “place I go.” Over the decades that place I enter when I’m deeply focusing on an emerging piece has been a steady source of renewal, peace, and communion with something bigger and wiser than myself.
It is a place where the leftover scraps from one project magically become the seeds of the next; where cast-off objects are elevated, re-imagined and invited into new conversations; and where order, harmony and meaning are married to invention, exploration, and good old-fashioned fooling around.
Art practice has taught me so much about how to live - how to trust, how to allow, how to follow a thread without knowing where it is going, how to attune myself to what is wanting to happen, how to get out of my own way, how to finish what I start, and how to enjoy the strange workings of my own weird mind and deeply feeling heart.
I hope the spirit of playful inquiry in which I make these piece resonates with your own spirit! Thanks for your curiosity about me and my work!
