WILLIAM DALEY: STUDIO COMPONENTS opens a few windows into the joy, spirit, and creative process of an artist – all of which might sound cliché if Daley’s works were not such powerful and focused products of a seven decade-long pursuit. Perspectives on his process –videos, Styrofoam molds, hand tools and drawings—complement his monumental works and illuminate his inventive mind and sustained vision.
Daley, a 1950 graduate of Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, has received many accolades, honorary doctorates, and has work in important museums and international collections; nevertheless he keeps trudging into the basement to wrestle with clay and challenge himself. Born in 1925 in Hastings-on-Hudson, he started drawing in New York City museums as a teenager, and is as active a draughtsman as he is a sculptor; on his studio wall myriad preparatory sketches lay buried under paint, each one cumulative in a life-long search. His wife Catherine Stennes Daley, also MassArt ‘50 and a longtime collaborator, notes that some evenings she still has to yell at him to leave the basement and call a day’s work to an end.
Where is Daley’s studio in the universe? It is a place of action, of reinvention, of self-determination, of many failures and steadily won triumphs. To explain his indefatigable motivation, he likes to quote from the essay “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” by Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914), Boston’s polymath logician. Daley is engaged in Peirce’s cyclical steps of trust, belief, and active thought. Daley argues that in learning, “we can’t hear the questions until they come through our hands.”
Pliant and disobedient clay is the place where he builds his thoughts into “whacked geometries” that confirm his search as much as they undergird his belief. In the spring of 2014, inspired by The Cloud of Unknowing, an anonymous 14th-century Christian ode to contemplation, Bill told me he found a correspondence between the author’s mysticism and his daily work: “When she wrote God, I said art, and when she wrote pray, I said practice.” In these pots, pragmatism and spirituality overlap.
Daley is considered by many as the forefather of contemporary American ceramics. He was also honored with The Society of Arts and Crafts Medal for Excellence in Craft established in 1913 to honor master craft artists.
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