We were lucky to catch up with Margaret Byrd recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Margaret thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. If you could go back in time do you wish you had started your creative career sooner or later? 

A creative spirit has burned brightly in me since childhood. If born an artist, an artist you will be. At 8 years old, we moved into a house that had a camera painted on the wall of a cold storage closet in the basement. I assured my mom I would convert the space into a darkroom so I could become the photographer I was destined to be. Although I would never develop film in that home, I graduated as the oldest student in my class with a BFA in photography 20 years later.

What I learned during art school expanded my creative curiosity, finding a passion beyond the lens of a camera. With a young family in tow, I set off to translate my degree into a sustainable art career, only to be tugged in different directions as I found myself raising 3 children on my own. When others would ask how I felt about abandoning my ‘art career’, it was my creative spirit that would respond – “I’m an artist and always will be. My time will come again”.

This passion has bubbled up and quietly simmered over 25 subsequent years. Although there were long quiet spells after art school, I always held the dream of expanding my creative exploration. When my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2015, my priorities shifted to care partner, and my creativity surged as a coping mechanism and a powerful way for self-care. What bloomed from a tumultuous time was a deeper understanding of how important it was to follow my life-long artistic calling. My time had come again.

Today, I am building the creative business I could never have dreamed of as an 8-year-old photographer. I firmly believe that every step I’ve taken has been an integral part of my winding path to the present. My only wish is to keep trusting the artist I was born to be as I watch my dreams come true.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Formally trained in photography in the 90s at the University of Montana, inspiration came from the natural world I was surrounded by, but I found a need to use my hands for building, and mixed media sculpture became my creative vehicle. My first installation was built of Polaroid transfers on hand-made paper embedded in large ice blocks placed outdoors to interact with the environment. The images were revealed slowly as the sculptures melted over several days, and eventually, blew away with the wind. From that launching point, I was hooked on creating ephemeral work outside of the four walls, influenced by its surroundings and openly available to be discovered by others, in hopes of piquing curiosity and encouraging wonder of space and time.

In 2017, Iceland presented the perfect environment to explore my fascination with ice as a transient medium, and I installed 14 small sculptural clusters around the Westfjords and Snaefellsnes Peninsula. The fever spread quickly as I traveled to place ephemeral installations across significantly diverse geographical locations over the following three years.

From the Arctic regions of Lofoten, Norway to the high desert plateau of Peru and along the wild Pacific coastline from Washington to Mexico, each installation was fuel for the next steps in my creative voyage.

Installing ephemeral art in pristine environments opened my eyes to the magical world of nature’s colors, and I’ve been creating work with both botanical dyes and earth pigments since placing that first ice piece. I returned to Iceland in 2019 to further explore an organic palette for my installation practice by extracting dye from plant materials such as seaweed and lichen. This time, I experimented with fiber, as well as ice, to build sculptural pieces for placement in the winter landscape. Adding fiber to my practice has expanded my experimentation with natural dyes and opened opportunities to scale and share my work through indoor installation as well.

Fiber also brought me back to the lens as a way to share my passion with others, but this time through video. I launched a YouTube channel in 2020, Margaret Byrd: Color Quest, to build a community celebrating organic color through hands-on tutorials and vlog-style content all about nature’s palette. Being a content creator in this fashion has been more rewarding than I could have imagined and has felt like a perfectly natural progression of my creative practice.

One of the most important revelations I’ve made on this artistic journey is my growing desire to honor the symbiotic relationship I am nurturing with Mother Earth. Exploring the properties of natural materials as a vessel to toast the pigments of land and sea have introduced a new dimension of discovery in my practice while extending humble respect to our world.

How did you build your audience on social media?

Instagram pulled me into the social media world while it was still primarily a creative platform to share visual imagery. Initially, I found it to be a wonderful space to connect with other artists and it gave me the opportunity to learn and build skills around digital marketing. Authenticity, consistency, and mindful engagement were key to establishing meaningful connections with my followers. When I jumped to YouTube in 2020, I applied the same principles and experienced much more rapid growth with a thriving community. While I’ve drifted away from Instagram as its core function has changed, I am passionate about the content I’m creating on YouTube and believe this has positively influenced my channel. In essence: show up, do what you love, and the rest will follow.

Have you ever had to pivot?

Joining my mother on a bucket-list trip to Alaska’s Inside Passage revealed both a wildly inspirational landscape and a horribly devastating discovery – dementia. Diagnosed with Alzheimer’s six months later, I made the profoundly difficult decision to move my mother into my home with 3 children navigating their teenage years. Although I never doubted my choice to become a full-time care partner, the impact it had on all of our lives was more than I could have imagined. To watch an amazing woman, who had also pivoted in her career from physician to literature professor, deteriorate so rapidly was devastating. And yet, it was this very painful experience that prompted my own shift to focus again on my artistic dreams. My mother taught me to be a strong and independent woman and to celebrate our creative gifts to the fullest.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.margaretbyrd.com
• Instagram: @moonbyrdie
• Facebook: @margaretbyrdstudio
• Youtube: www.youtube.com/c/MargaretByrdColorQuest
• Other: Pinterest: @margaretbyrdstudio TikTok: moonbyrdie