The West Raleigh artist carves discarded material like granite into intricate, sculptural interlocking art with geometric roots.
by Colony Little | photography by Matt Ramey
Matt Byrd’s stone sculptures are studies in problem solving. In some works, shapes are stacked upon one another, fitting closely together like puzzle pieces. In others, the geometry is disrupted by smooth spheres sandwiched between chiseled blocks of interlocking rock.
To some, the video game Tetris may come to mind, while fans of mid-century modern design may notice the influence of sculptors like the late Isamu Noguchi, who created iconic designs for Herman Miller using materials like wood, metal, glass and stone. One of Noguchi’s quotes regarding natural materials mirrors Byrd’s own design philosophy: “The beauty of a particular stone can only be seen when found.”
For Byrd, it’s an artistic point of departure, albeit with a looser definition of ‘found.’ “I steal everything,” he laughs. But he means this quite literally: Byrd drives his weathered truck around Raleigh to source his material, primarily granite, from construction sites during the demolition phase. “The amount of good granite that goes to landfills is outrageous,” he says. “So, if I’m driving around in the middle of the night and find granite destined for the dump, I’ll put on my hi-vis jacket and load my truck up.”
Byrd, who’s been a stone mason for more than a decade, grew up in the trades; his father owns Byrd Tile Distributors, so in addition to being close to the material, he also studied the techniques of artisans within his family’s orbit. One of those people was Brooks Burleson, the mason behind the undulating stone walkways, retaining walls, arches and bridges at the Duke Gardens. “I met Brooks when I was 5, and when I turned 19, my mom said, Brooks has been waiting, are you ready to work?,” Byrd says. “At that point I was ready.” Byrd apprenticed with Burleson from 2011 to 2014, also studying at the Penland School of Craft and the John C. Campbell Folk School to pick up skills in metalsmithing and woodworking along the way. He didn’t love school, but he did love working under Burleson.
When he was 23, Byrd moved to New York, then later Northern California, working a slew of jobs ranging from set design for magazine shoots to apprenticeships. These refined his diverse skill set, but ultimately the lure of stone beckoned Byrd home. “I have worked in woodshops and I’ve worked in metal shops, but I just didn’t have an emotional connection to those materials. I’m pretty at home with stone,” he says. Byrd returned to the Triangle and stonemasonry in 2018, reconnecting with Burleson and with private clients. During his spare time, he began experimenting with sculpting, using the same dry-laid stone wall techniques to create small, abstract sculptures from salvaged stone.
Byrd creates his work by hand using chisels and saw blades to carve interlocking shapes that are refined through sanding and grinding. His early abstract works combined texture and shapes to create waves, arches and other geometric forms. In one piece from Byrd’s 2020 Howard series, two pieces of coarse, speckled grey granite are bifurcated by a piece of polished pink stone sculpted to fit snugly between the blocks.
These works were a study in harmony and contrast. They were difficult to execute but popular within design circles, landing in publications like Dwell, Elle and Architectural Digest. Byrd says he felt compelled to make these pieces to demonstrate his skills and establish himself as an artist. “Some of the motifs were seemingly trendy at times,” he says. “I’m trying to get away from that. There’s a lot of work that I am ready to show now that I could have made back then, but I didn’t have the trust from people to make it.”
The popularity of Byrd’s early work gave him the opportunity to exhibit more broadly. His first solo show, Lorimer I, was in Carrboro in 2021, followed by another solo show in Raleigh in 2022, Lorimer II, that Byrd mounted in a vacant space on Fayetteville Street with the assistance of Dave Nikolay of Empire Properties. He also began working with Love House, a design showroom in New York that represents emerging and established designers. “I owe my whole career to them,” Byrd says. For a 2023 show with Love House, Byrd produced furniture and accessories, including benches and lamps, which were popular with collectors and interior designers alike.
Recently, Byrd has found creative inspiration through travel, refining his practice and exploring new directions in his work. In 2023, he participated in a residency at the Centro Internazionale di Scultura Peccia in Switzerland. It was an instructive period consisting of six months of working with Peccia marble, an indigenous stone, and honing his artistic voice. “I was a lot more productive — there aren’t as many vices out there, I couldn’t just go to the pub all the time,” he says. “There was nobody really watching me, either, so it let me be a little vulnerable with my work and do things that I wanted to do instead of the things that I thought people wanted me to do.”
Up until this point, Byrd had felt like he had to justify his talent and skill, both to himself and others. “You’ve got to earn your stripes a little bit — I wanted to prove that I knew how to carve stone and do it very intricately,” Byrd says. His earlier works from that first Howard series were a testament to that belief, at times technical just for the sake of being technical. “I was driving myself mad making these super-complicated pieces,” he says. “But I showed to myself that I could carve on a more complex level.” When it comes to the perceptions of others, these days he’s more resolute: “Now I have you with me on this ride, now let me do something that I really want to do.”
Part of that meant letting his hair down a bit, to enjoy the material and the spontaneity of the process. “Since I’m coming from a masonry background, I literally look at stones as building blocks and try to see how I can make an object fit what I want it to do,” he says. “Or when I’m out getting coffee or something, I’ll see an intersection of two buildings, and I’ll like how the shapes fit together — then I’ll think about how I can expand on that intersection through my work.” Recently, he began combining elements from distinct phases of his artistic career in new works that fuse stone carvings with woodworking and design. Totemic carved stone pieces rest on wooden plinths and stools crafted from wood and stone, while other works contain his stone puzzles within beautifully carved, sanded wooden boxes.
His latest work is also infused with a little humor. The impetus behind one piece titled A Seven Minute Face was in response to the didactic style, particularly around figurative realism, he encountered from one of his instructors in Switzerland. “I was working with a classically trained sculptor who was very strict about form; at one point I was like, I don’t think it has to be like that, I think that’s kind of silly. So I started seeing how fast I could make a face,” Byrd says. Instead of relying on a high degree of naturalism, a painstakingly slow process, Byrd chiseled an amorphous face with two round eyes, a prism-shaped nose and a straight mouth in seven minutes. The result is appealing and deceptively simple — creating that symmetrical, cartoon-like face so quickly would only be possible with a high degree of technical skill.
This summer, Byrd will head to Japan to work out of the Shiro Oni Studio in Onishi, a small town in a mountainous region two hours from Tokyo. While there, he will be working as an artist in residence, once again creating with local materials.
Until then, he’ll be wielding his chisels and saw blades at his outdoor studio at his home near Lake Johnson, pushing his work into new realms. “What I’m working on right now are a mix of texture, big puzzle and caricatures,” he says, “But I’d like to show a combination of everything that I’ve worked on since I started.”
This article originally appeared in the March 2025 issue of WALTER magazine.
