William P. Daley

Dani Galietti
William P. Daley

On Thursday, March 19, 2009 visiting artist William P. Daley spoke to University of Delaware art students. William was an incredibly inspiring and entertaining speaker, whose passion and vivacity for creating resonated throughout his work and words. Though extremely intelligent and intellectual he asserted his ideas through a playful disposition, while sporadically making jokes. Even when time had elapsed due to technical difficulties he retained blithe attitude. Bill even shared crackers he had with the whole room, though with a promise that we would all come up and rub a huge ceramic pot he brought with him!

Bill started his talk by having us all close our eyes making meditative gestures and repeating “Nothing is going to be alright.” He spoke about Charles Sander Peirce, and how he was a “marvelous failure” in his attempt to rewrite Kants Critique of Pure Judgement. Bill spoke about how Peirce broke the art experience into a sort of a priori “threeness”. This “threeness” began with a “firstness” comprised of the “momentary fleeting and evanescent” experience. This experience he likened to waking up in the Garden of Eden on the first day of creation, and that when you experienced it (the “it” being art) you knew it. The “secondness” was the artists, or the people “taking two rocks and banging them together.” And finally, the “thirdness” which was all the people that’s enabled “secondness” to occur; these are all the collectors, curators, scholars theoreticians, etc.

Bill made pots, and was interested in the delineation between inside and outside. He worked with the intent to obscure these boundaries. Pots are vessels, which to him are “keepers giving form to spirit”. In constructing his vessels, or pots, he employed the use of the vessica, which a cosmic symbol composed of two intersecting circles, which represented “and not either or”. The Vessica represented two entities becoming one. Bill is extremely interested in cosmic ideas, like the vessica and the axis mundi, which gives his work an extremely holistic and all encompassing presence. Bill continuously recounted how he worked with “dirt”. This idea of working with such an earthly material provokes ideas of mortality life and existence. Manuel Delanda spoke about our earthly bodies essentially coming from a cosmic stardust. It is this idea that we are just cosmic dust, or dirt, that creates a physical gravitation towards Bill’s “dirt” work, while mentally opening up discussion on our earthly existence in the cosmic schema.