The way Shelley Parriott's color field sculptures have been placed around the pond and wetlands at the upscale Noble Horizons Retirement Community in Salisbury, CT, is restful, fun, illuminating, revealing and hard to top as a setting for the woman's art.

We've been seeing Parriott's work quite a bit over the years. Just this summer, she's got pieces in both the Kingston Sculpture Biennial, as well as the Byrdcliffe Outdoor Sculpture show in Woodstock. Both are places she's been returning to with regularity.

You may know Parriott's work by its bright coloring and sheer aspects. You can see through her powdercoated perforated steel or steel wire pieces in such way that, at least on first impression, it seems she's working in a form of plastic. Only closeup does one get sense of the solidness of her materials, as well as the seriousness of what she's after, both in terms of her concept and the manners in which she uses placement of her pieces to comment on, and reveal oftenhidden aspects of, the landscapes they inhabit.

But what she's brought together at Noble Horizons has got to be a career highlight for the Brooklyn native who's been dedicated to the arts since her childhood, through an education at the respected Rhode Island School of Design, to the dozen or so years she's been working what she learned from painting and then collage into the three dimensionality of sculpture.

"It's based on a concept... I guess it's a concept," Parriott says of the color field work that's been her main calling of late. "It's about the ways in which our existence is transitory; it's about a passage through existence...I'm trying to capture and show something ethereal, via a sheerness and transparency not usually associated with sculpture."

Parriott says she realizes the newness of what she's been doing, along with its technical challenges. She's taking elements of minimalism, seen more often in painting or more conceptual forms of sculpture, and lending it a populist, Op-Art face.

She came to the forms she works with via her collages, which often included fabric, whose textures and layering ability she particularly loved. After a time when she was consciously trying to flatten her pieces back onto the walls where they'd long been, she suddenly found herself drawn to the wire substructure she had created to hang cloth on and explored from there. Eventually, she realized the armature was enough, as sculpture. She liked the layering she could create with wire and, eventually, punched steel.

But how did the palette come about?

"For many years I was entirely monochromatic, working in very, very subtle shades of gray," she explains. "But then I took my new work outdoors and realized I could no longer afford such subtlety. I needed something with more vibrancy. I found myself forced to work larger and brighter."

Parriott, who started coming up to the Woodstock area more and more often during the 1980s, eventually settling in Saugerties, says that like many other artists she knows, she was originally attracted by the need for more space.

"I fled," she says with a laugh.

And yet in the next breath, she observes that her move from collage art to ever-larger outdoor pieces would never have happened without her move. Just as her actual installations cannot happen, as she says, without the aid of her invaluable installer, Todd Brannon.

"Each time I make a piece it becomes a process of pleasant surprises," she says of the various elements in her process, from ordering steel and having it punched and bent, to its coloring and eventual placement in natural surroundings. "It's important to me that the pieces look ephemeral and yet be extremely durable and anchored. It's a true dichotomy."

Parriott noted that the Salisbury show, up through October 8 and well worth the hour's drive to see, came about when the institution's publicity director saw her work in another setting. But it's pushed her into wanting to take her work several steps further; just as her work in past sculpture biennials in Kingston and at Byrdcliffe have allowed her to push her art to new heights.

"I want to make it very large," she says. "I want there to be more opportunity for people to walk through it, to interact with it."

She says that as she's working one idea to life, others crowd in for consideration. Sometimes sculptures appear in her dreams.

"I get the idea and order materials for it, knowing essentially what it will be before I start making it," she explains. "But then there are elements of surprise tied into what happens... it's not an easy form to be making maquettes in."

Parriott's work, large and unwieldy as it might seem, has started to sell well in commission form for outdoor and even some indoor settings around the area. Moreover, its distinctive presence in a number of key settings, plus its populist, easy-to-get appeal, is building her hopes that she will now be allowed that next step up the cultural ladder towards the region's and nation's big, top name sculpture parks. The museums that serve as gateways to the really big commissioners and collectors...

Sure, not all of it is as successful as the exhibition up at Noble Horizons, just now. Sometimes the works can get lost in their surroundings, or look less than what they are.

Yet by what she's showing in Connecticut, that doesn't always have to be so. Given the right opportunity, this woman delivers... and grows with each opportunity to achieve more with her singular art.

For more about all things Shelley Parriott, including all her current sculptural sites - including Salisbury, CT, visit www.shelleyparriott.com.