tomdaileyart@gmail.com
@tomdai1ey
BIO
Tom Dailey is a sculptor and installation artist who loves texture and material. Born and raised in rural Vermont surrounded by chickens, goats, and town-wide yard sales, Tom finds that the materials he uses echo his upbringing. He loves to play with materials such as fur, feathers, corn, and paint to build forms that aren’t quite as they seem.
Dailey graduated from the Maine College of Art & Design in May 2026 with a BFA in Sculpture. He has shown work in galleries across Portland, Maine, as well as presented his speculative biodesign project Eat Dirt with creative partner Cam Fox at the Parsons New School for Design in NYC. In his free time, Tom is an enjoyer of word games, berry picking, and pointing out plants that he remembers eating as a child. He loves the fall, and is devastated he missed apple picking season this year.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Through installation, I construct realms of obscurity and allure, misted with the clashing of estranged materials. Using hay that scratches the skin, corn husks matted into a pulp, and crumbling Froot Loops, my work examines the interplay of material agency and human perception. Familiar figures are made precarious as they shed into the space, denaturalizing the habitual and mundane.
From a domestic cat to looming sphinx, corn husks to an alien abstraction, and an exit sign to a scratchy, lean body, I disorient the familiar and challenge patterns of association and assumption. Sculpture allows me to explore contradiction, expanding categories between alien and earthly, spectator and product. The creatures and forms I create exist in the gradations between alive and not-alive, of simulated and real. When an element of a work begins to impact the body beyond sight, then it becomes real. I question how close I can pull the viewer into an illusion.