For Matt Byrd, carving stone isn’t about control—it’s about discovery. “To make something that’s just like a sculpture and already have it figured out really takes the fun out of it,” he says. “Leaving room for mystery makes it worth doing.”

Byrd, who grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina, began his career pushing himself to master the technical side of stone carving. His early sculptures were intentionally complex, exercises in precision and technique. “I felt like I needed to prove to myself that I could carve on a technical level,” he recalls. Now, with more confidence in his abilities, his process has shifted toward realizing ideas he’s carried for years. “I’m creating pieces that I’ve had in my mind for a long time, and that feels really good.”

That process often begins long before he steps into the studio. Roughly seventy-five percent of his material comes from salvage—stone pulled from forgotten corners, picked up on bike rides through Raleigh, or collected from construction sites. “Sometimes I’ll take a detour on the way home just to see if there’s something I haven’t seen before,” he says. “Finding a piece of stone is almost just as satisfying as finishing a piece sometimes, so it’s kind of a win-win.”

The joy of salvage isn’t only in discovery, but in the challenge it presents. “Some days I’ll go in being like, this is not going to work,” he admits. “And then at the end of the day, I’m just sitting there like—yes, yes, this is what it’s supposed to look like. I didn’t know this was what it was supposed to look like, but that’s it.”

While Byrd’s studio is filled with drawings, thousands of them, he describes them as loose “parameters” rather than fixed plans. Impressions that outline an idea without closing it off, leaving space and opportunity for the element of surprise. Even outside the studio, Byrd leaves himself open to discovery. Like a radio antenna signal-searching for inspiration, he remains tuned-in to the shapes and forms all around him. Moved by the way two buildings intersect or the particular angle of light across a wall, he creates what he calls "fake exhibitions" in his head—spontaneous compositions pulled from everyday moments. “A lot of it’s just the mystery to me on how this piece will work,” he says. “How am I going to make this piece look presentable to me?”

That openness is how Byrd sees the world, and what keeps the work alive. Each sculpture, whether born from salvaged stone or sketched from imagination, is part of a larger trajectory Byrd hopes to see clearly only in hindsight. “At the end of my life, I want to be able to zoom out,” he says. “You’ll be able to see that arc, downfall, peak…how my work changed throughout the years. But I ultimately want it to always look like my work.”

For Byrd, stone carving is less about arriving at perfection than building that arc piece by piece—leaving space for uncertainty, discovery, and the personal mark of the hands that made it.