Liam Daly is a multimedia sculptor and teacher who lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His work creates a dialogue between object, display, and viewer by drawing on material, object, and psychological motifs. Daly was born and raised in New York City and moved to New Mexico when he was eight years old. He often draws inspiration from the ways in which he lived his life and understood the world around him in the city versus how those understandings shifted after moving to New Mexico during his formative years. These contrasting experiences of understanding play a prominent role in how Daly creates and displays objects in his artistic practice. Daly spent most of his early years roaming the halls of the natural history museum where he learned most of what he knew about the world outside of New York by studying and contemplating the objects there. After Moving to New Mexico he would spend hours exploring the landscape finding his own fossils and specimens to study and treasure.
Moving to New Mexico was also the start of his artistic career. Daly was inspired at a young age by his grandmother's work in clay and developed a passion for both the creation of ceramic objects and later, the scientific and alchemical nature of the material while completing his undergraduate degree at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. While there, his practice expanded to include broader sculptural material explorations, but clay and glaze chemistry remains a vital source of inspiration for his artistic process. His experience in metal and wood fabrication is at the core of his displays for the objects he creates. Most known for his work in large-scale fabricated steel sculpture, Daly’s work has occupied numerous spaces, including Sustain Gallery and The Back of the Yards Gallery in Chicago.