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 is currently studying at the Maine College of Art & Design, expecting to graduate 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
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.