BYRD (Dan Maginnity) is a professional artist living and working on unceded Ngunnawal/Ngambri land in Canberra Australia.

Byrd has been operating outside of conventional art institutions in public spaces since over 25 years. He now balances his commercial and experimental practice - aside murals he makes works for gallery exhibitions; commissions for private clients; as well as competing for public government  council & commercial mural tenders.

Byrd’s artworks range from soft-toy-portraits of road-kill; to life-size sculptures of architecture & motor-vehicles; to wall drawing; commercial murals and graffiti; to studio paintings and community projects. His works to date have included many public and private walls; a 72 meter lift shaft in a multi-million dollar precinct development; various 1 to 1 scale cardboard sculptures (namely, pieces of architecture, German forestry towers, a bus, a station wagon, several bob-cats, a Vespa, a vintage Zeta Sunbeam ute, amongst others); and innumerable found grounds, ranging from Freight carriages to feathers.

Byrd is passionate about grass roots and activist art-practice, and his artwork centres around the interface between the human condition and the places they occupy. His lens has a deep appreciation of science, Australia’s creatures and natural environment; occupied by endemic multi-species communities and humans. He is interested in the aspirations and pitfalls of culture and place-making, through the collection, reflection and re-presentation (or reimagining) of local things. 

His themes emerge from personal explorations of the politics of the environment; of gender; of race in the Australia context; of the arts industry -  and how all of it is shaped by language and mediated in pop culture.

As a painter, byrd works on and in response to space, meaning that the mural paintings are sited in place. This mode of painting has grown from his roots in the Graffiti scene; Graffiti (being a political activity enacted on urban spaces) is primarily tolerated in the forgotten and unrealized parts of the city, the soft edges.

Over two decades byrd has collected a nearly unlimited vocabulary of forms, figures and patterns. They are as diverse (and sometimes transgressive) in their sources as they are variable in their styles. He manipulates, recycles and converts these in paintings using colour relations, blocking shapes, pattern layers and erasures. byrd tries to achieve tension between palimpsest and negative space. His methods of mark-making harness chance (the accidental slur or dripping of paint; or a scratch or a footprint); and the way time changes and disfigures an original surface into a piece of refuse- or in his eyes: to a new form of beauty.

Since the late 1990s Byrd has been leaving traces across the Australian east coast. Currently his exhibition and commission based practice has an extensive list of collectors and clients. (email to request.)