Hello! I’m Mariah Palmer — nature craft artist and wildlife advocate and Local Earth is my studio located in the mountains near Bozeman, Montana. My art practice is deeply rooted in my relationship with the natural world.

I grew up in the mountains near Sun Valley, Idaho, and spent most of my waking hours outside. My parents are my most influential teachers. They taught me the joy of creating and craftsmanship. My father is a builder who creates one-of-a-kind art and furniture with reclaimed wood, and my mother was a gardener and plant caretaker. She was always collecting things from nature and making mobiles or wreaths. To this day, I can feel her presence as I weave willow and dried flowers into wreaths. I later studied Clothing, Textiles, and Design at the University of Idaho. Since then, I have explored many different mediums, including clothing design, metalsmithing, graphic design, photography, printmaking, ceramics, and more. In my latest endeavor, I co-founded Wilder Goods — an art gallery and shop featuring local and US-made art, independent clothing brands, and home goods. In that space, I began offering workshops, which sparked a move away from retail and into teaching and hosting workshops rooted in connecting to the land.

Over the past few years, I pieced together the school of my dreams by finding workshops that centered around our local ecosystem, including a ‘Master Naturalist Certification’ through the Montana Outdoor Science School, ‘Resilient Homestead,’ a permaculture course with Broken Ground–as well as various dye courses, including ‘Screen Printing with Natural Dyes’ in Brooklyn at the Textile Arts Center, ‘Printing with Natural Dyes’ with the Maiwa School of Textiles and ‘The Chemistry of Natural Dyes,’ also with the Maiwa School of Textiles.

Lately, you can find me in my home studio collecting plants for dyes on fabric, crushing rocks for paint, making miniature fairy and doll things with my daughter, and choreographing dances with my dance partner and our local modern dance crew. And when I’m not holed up in my studio, I’m collaborating with other local artists and activists through the Local Earth Collective.