Photographic artist Margaret Hyde creates images that are as precise and glowing as gems. Describing herself as a “transformative” artist, she shapes lustrous, natural subjects that are worthy of contemplation.
The Memphis-born and raised artist literally and figuratively focuses on the minutiae of the natural world, using close-ups and macro lenses. The result is a cross between the meditative and the transcendent; qualities that she also bring to her life outside her artwork, exemplified by her work in support of the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis through her family’s Hyde Family Foundations.
Eleven years ago, she produced an Emmy nominated documentary short, The Witness: From the Balcony of Room 306, detailing the last days of Martin Luther King; she’s also written children’s books; shot documentaries in Bhutan, and photographed orphanages in Liberia.
But her recent art veers considerably away from the documentary. She uses images such as shells and flowers to create an entire celestial universe of emotion and beauty. Hyde says “the purpose of art is to make you stop and look and think…if you keep seeing different things and asking different questions then that’s a successful piece of art.”
Her current series involve the collection of tiny objects such as shells, beach glass, scrap metal, and simple flowers and seeds. From these prosaic, intimate bits of life’s flotsam, she builds tiny sculptures, utilizing water and light to reshape these materials into her own tiny, glowing universe. The dimensionality she creates, the rich and mysterious color palettes she shapes, are matched by the inner shine of her work.
“I collect and photograph things most people would walk by,” she notes in her artist’s statement. “Water… flows through the sculptures, reflecting its infinite memory of the people, places and things that it has encountered along the way.”
It’s a fascinating idea, that water holds memory – one that oddly enough is a key tenet of the current Disney film Frozen 2. But Hyde’s work makes this messaging far more profound.
Her unique vision is an outgrowth of macro photography, most often used to examine something more closely. But what Hyde examined was more an internal imagining than an object itself. “I walked into an alley and someone had drained a swimming pool, and the water was rushing down the alley. It no longer looked like an alley…I put the macro lens on my camera and took photographs of light on water. I realized I didn’t need to go anywhere – everything I needed was right here, beauty, transformation right in front of me, I just was not seeing it…I went from being a photographer with a good eye, to an artist who used a camera to create art.”
Now she shares the butterfly images and Batman’s cape she finds in a protective mussel shell; an eternal moment in a drop of dew that glows like a diamond on multi-hued green leaf.
Arguably, color, light, and her use of water to illuminate are the main components of her macro work, but the textures she conveys are perhaps the true entry point into her radiant world. The ridged striations of a leaf, the ripples in a dot of dew, a sense of rounded, thick suspension in a drop of water.
In Hyde’s Shell Eddies series, the lapis lazuli blue and amethyst crystal quality of works such as “Shell Vortex” and “Shell Pirouette” are smooth and seductive; a whirl that is soft and supple yet somehow as solid as a stone, a universe unfolding in motion.
Her Shell Scapes series, including such opalescent, winged images as “Pastel Pinion” use essentially the same color palette as Shell Eddies, but in lighter shades, and with a quicker, brighter feel that evokes mother of pearl butterflies, seeds, twins, and with an airier more translucent texture.
Mystic Masks turns a simple dandelion flower into something cosmic and ethereal; “Canine Mask” is both wolf and flower; “Imp Mask” the genesis of a fairytale character.
Hyde’s Migration Series takes a single dandelion seed and turns it into a study in perfection in “Feathered Seed;” the simplicity and wonder of this image, an embodiment of life, is both alien bird and message of hope. But it is a translucent cosmos that Hyde captures in another work, “Cosmic Dandelion.”
There are the certainly the origins of this astonishingly minute, perfect work in her earlier photography– Hyde’s travel images in her Seascapes series is pearled and reflective with light; her Memphis images rippled with visceral texture.
Jeweled and mesmerizing: Hyde gives viewers memorable images spun from the imagination in close-up.