Delaney Gardner-Sweeney

Born and raised in Boulder, Colorado, artist, writer, and researcher Delaney Gardner-Sweeney's artistic practice explores the intimate vernacular of a place as they investigate how these culturally integrated and place-based objects, moments, and motions reveal private stories and map emotion and affect within a landscape. They work to make visible these unnamed and overlooked cultural objects and phenomena. They build shelves—metaphorical and otherwise—on which the small yet telling parts of the world can sit, finally precious and carefully tended. These seemingly insignificant remnants serve as clues, vignettes that quietly reveal an invisible regulatory cultural and social framework that either instigates or hinders a society’s two most powerful tools: courageous sharing and empathetic listening. They work as an artist and writer to investigate these small cultural borderlands, such as a curtain, an abandoned house, a grave plot, a roadside memorial, or a letter, to reveal and understand a place’s layered, intimate histories. Gardner-Sweeney works to engage communities through storytelling, pseudo-ethnographical and ecological studies, and writings that span a diverse range of media and methods to reveal seemingly insignificant boundaries, the border between private and public, the living and the dead, truth and fiction, the written and spoken, memory and event—all boundaries that are easily blurred, merged, and broken, where thin veils draw lines between bedroom and sidewalk, diary and newspaper.

Gardner-Sweeney received their BFA in Sculpture and Post Studio Practice and BA in Evolutionary Biology and Ecology from the University of Colorado and has exhibited at Agnes Scott College, Decatur, GA; the University of Colorado, Boulder, CO; Del Mar College, Corpus Christi, TX; Rancho La Florida, Antonito, CO; CO-OPT Research + Projects, Lubbock, TX; Tablelands Center for Bioregional Art, Lubbock, TX; Dab Art Co., Los Angeles, CA; Pour-d Gallery, Rockford, MI; The University of Colorado Natural History Museum, Boulder, CO; The Mountain Research Station, Nederland, CO; and Galleria Artificio, Meta, Columbia; among others. The artist received the 2020 Prairiewood Preserve Residency and 2024 Tablelands Center for Bioregional Art Residency in collaboration with Aaron D. Treher. Gardner-Sweeney’s writing and projects have been published in multiple publications including San Luis Valley, On Collecting (now archived in the Special Collections at the University of Colorado Boulder), Artistonish Magazine, Ecology of Practice, RADIUS Volume 1, and The Segmented Whole.