SELECTED WORK

ARTIST STATEMENT

I’m interested in the materials that stick to my fingers, that even hours after leaving the studio cling to my clothes and hands. A year after my installation, Garage Rooster, which involved hay, heat lamps, and a humanoid rooster figure, I still see small red feathers float from dusty corners. Bright pink slime made to imitate bubblegum still renders the zipper of my favorite jacket useless, and right now, my freezer is filled to the brim with corn that I shucked for a recent project. It’s too sweet, it's too sticky: it's everywhere. There is a precarity to the materials I work with, a degradation that challenges the forms they take on.

I pull from the mundane and add surreal twists: what begins as a piece of cheese transforms into a lure down a long hallway. I think of it as a disorientation of the familiar– a way of challenging patterns of association and assumption. Sculpture allows me to explore when things contradict themselves, existing as both alien and earthy, spectator and product. Within the creatures and forms I create, I play in the gradations between alive and not-alive, of simulated and real. Installation plays a key role in how I express my conceptual interests. 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.

Garage Rooster (gumball eyes chewed by the dark)

2024, installation (hay, heat lamps, steel, plaster, toilet paper, latex, feathers, acrylic paint, pumice gel, air dry clay, gumballs)

Exit

2025, installation (cement, steel rod, wood, wax, acrylic paint, plaster, spray foam)

Sandtrap

2025, installation (sand, projection, golf ball, golf club, air dry clay, acrylic paint, spring, wood, tarp)

Nervous as a Long-Tailed Cat in a Room Full of Rocking Chairs

2025, mixed-media sculpture (cattail seed pulp, liquid watercolor, steel rod, chicken wire, memory foam, carpet foam, burlap, zip ties, sting, wax)

Sick for Home (she stood in tears amid the alien corn)

2025, mixed-media sculpture (shucked corn cobs, shellac, corn husk pulp, paper pulp, rusted agricultural chains, steel, string, wax, acrylic paint, corn silk)

5. Bubblegum

2024, mixed-media sculpture (plexiglass, glue, borax, acrylic paint, alcohol ink, picture hanging wire, paper, spray foam)

6. The Cowardly Lion (whole body)

2025, mixed-media sculpture (ply-wood, plaster, faux-fur, gem-stones, rope, clothesline, acrylic paint)

7. Plumage

2024, installation (glitter, mini-fans, chicken wire, burlap, plaster, latex, air dry clay, acrylic paint, feathers)

8. Dolled Up

2025, mixed-media sculpture (wood, found objects, faux-fur, bells, wire, porcelain, air-dry clay, rock, acrylic pint, wallpaper)

© TOM DAILEY ART