Peaceable Kingdom depicts an eagle, beaver, mountain goat, and rhinoceros within a roughly sixteen-inch square relief. The work’s subject refers to a biblical prophecy (Isaiah 11:6) that tells of a time when harmony will exist among living creatures: “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.”
This prophecy harmonizes with Daley’s creative philosophy: “Creating a...unity...was more than the resolution of opposites. Not ‘either-or’ but ‘both-and.’ . . . It is Organic Engineering in Mud, combining Bumps and Holes, utilizing inside and outside by reversal, to make a membrane wall that is strong visually and tactilely engaging.”
Daley earned degrees from the Massachusetts College of Art and Columbia University’s Teachers College. He taught ceramics at colleges in Iowa and New York before spending most of his career in the Industrial Design and Crafts departments at the Philadelphia College of Art (later the University of the Arts). He received awards from the College Art Association, the American Craft Council, and the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, among others. His work was widely exhibited and is represented in public and private collections, including the Clayarch Gimhae Museum, South Korea; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Stedelijk Museum, Netherlands; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and Woodmere.
