About Tara Daly
Tara Daly is a California artist who makes sculptures, paintings, and textiles in material-driven processes that explore power, collapse, and connection. She has exhibited at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Richmond Arts Center, Museum of Craft and Design, and the Contemporary Craft Center, among other non-profit art centers and galleries nationally. A graduate of the Santa Monica College of Design, Art and Architecture and the San Francisco Art Institute, Tara has been an artist in residence at Anderson Ranch Center for the Arts, Penland School of Crafts, the Santa Fe Art Institute and was a recipient of Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center.
Artist Statement
I am drawn to weaving as both labor and as a metaphor. I taught myself to weave on improvised, wall mounted looms and it is a way to connect with something ancient and human. I use materials found in hobby and craft supply stores as well as thrift shops and I incorporate ceramic beads I've made and also use plastic and glass beads. I begin “blind,” without pattern or cartoon, which sometimes means undoing hours of work that doesn't jibe. My compositions rely on symmetry, and their abstract geometric shapes that have a spiritual feeling, like stained glass or mandalas. I think of them as schematics for truths I can’t fully articulate, diagrams of balance and connection. Making these works is a receptive, intuitive process, and a striving for harmony and beauty.