THERESA BYRNES SELF-LOVE
What does self-love mean to you?
I truly and deeply love myself because I am nature. Making art connects me directly to the force of life, to creation/destruction. Artistic intuition includes me in the ecstatic dance, the magnetic tension between everything and nothing. I know when to stop the push or pull, the mark, pour, drip, or flick. Pigment is the extension of my soul. It is an honor to play, to be alive, to have waterfalls coursing though my veins and cyclones in my eyes.
Self-love can be skewed (made redundant) by a belief human supremacy. Self love goes beyond self acceptance and pride, it grows from our true grit and core, what we are all made from, stardust. The self to me is not just the result of individuating to become a whole and separate entity, it is equally about connection to nature and to the elemental building blocks of all life.Loving self is not about holding self under critical imagined gaze it comes from gratitude and a thrill for living. SELF-LOVE is BEING profoundly CONNECTED.
2. How do you fall in love with yourself every day?
I have lived 5 decades now and am as rebellious and spunky as a teen. Having a neuromuscular disorder, FA. Physical tasks become slower and need focus. I am a warier. Life has challenges, struggles and I train for them. working hard even to get in the shower but it makes my muscles pop and even though I am categorized as disabled, physical challenge sculpts me into an athlete.
I love being me, my struggle inclusive. I do not pray for a cure, or to be anyone else. I do no aspire to be normal. I love the depths.
Every day I fall in love with the air, how automatically it is drawn into my lungs. And I breath. Every day I fall in love with my mind, as new ideas come and hint at what I will be creating -painting/performing or writing.
3. Your ideal vision of beauty…………..
I head to my Studio on E9th from my apartment on E10th. I wear a mix of clothes I have had for 10 or 15 yrs. I add up the cost of my entire outfit from underwear to hat. Some hand me downs, some found, some from thrift stores and some just worn for decades. If an outfit costs less than 20 dollars than I feel like a million bucks.
You can NOT buy style, you are a true original, have earned swagger by loving the planet and by not falling for the hype.
I remember well the night after my 2010 guerrilla performance, THE MEASURE OF MAN. It was Christmas eve and a blizzard had hit. i performed near naked, on the back of truck, on the Bowery NYC. I was bound to a 7 foot circle and like a clock it was slowly revolving. Representing Leonardo DaVinci’s anatomical drawing THE VITRUVIAN MAN, I dripped oil. And as last minute Xmas shoppers spent, I protested consumerism, stared down headlights like they were the eyes of Gods, re-evaluating the supremacy of God - reminding us of the supremacy of nature.
Times of mass celebration and spirituality should NOT be a time when we forget and ignore our responsibly to the planet and to sustaining life on it.
We are quick to blame government and corporations for environmental disasters, but then we jump into shop-till-you-drop-mode in the name of God.
We should stop celebrating like there was no tomorrow and begin to celebrate like there will be.
I had barely scrubbed the black oil from my skin and hair. My friends on the crew and I went to my fave East Village vegetarian eatery, Kate’s joint. Exhausted and elated we arrived, ravenous. I had stared into the eyes of the gods, of authority, the government backed fossil fuel giants and us, the masses. I glanced up at the TV that hung above the bar, to glimpse an eye witness news anchor with thick make-up and designer dress. At that point I felt so powerfully beautiful and did not compare with the ideals of beauty that was jammed down our throats. The Beauty I knew was messy, defiant and piercing with truth. It seemed to me that the pursuit of, and even the attainment of glamour was fraught with lies and deceit.
In the following months I completed and exhibited a series called DIRTY GLAMOUR. All the paintings were done on old beat-up wood. I find complex beauty in decay. When painting the aged surface I was collaborating with nature, with the effects of wind, storm and of time. A store bought canvas holds no ghosts no history and its newness and polish holds no interest for me.
In my 2018 performance BROKEN I compared myself to old wood. Stating that term disabled implies without ability. Similarly old wood is assumed trash. Both untruths. In a world obsessed with and aspiring to comfort and glamour it becomes difficult to reconcile age. As an artist experiencing creeping disability, now being 50, riding a wheelchair, with slurred speech, I am not broken and worthless I am limitless and profound. I am no longer young and beautiful, just beautiful.
4. What you are doing to make that vision reality?
Inspiration is a cascading waterfall in my life (I can barely keep up with myself). I am never blocked and always working on a project I am passionate about. Ideas descend on me in a phrase, a visual, an action, in a dream or in a combination of those. Inspiration comes with simple clarity, even if pulling it off in the real world is epic and seems impossible. I am good at pulling off the impossible possibly because I make no excuses and just get started. If I run out of money to self-fund a performance and with projects back to back don’t have time to write or wait for a grant. 70% of my income comes form barter and trade based on respect for my work. I find a way around money, respect becomes my currency. Once a project gets motion it begins to speed toward completion. The vision of the project; painting, series, performance is so clear it has its own will, it is like I am just pulling strings in this dimension to make it happen.
My vigor, figure and my high energy (regardless of FA) is the result making the fundamental vision real - health an wellbeing, that puts the show on the road. I weight train and am vegan, I’ve been vegetarian since I was 11. I discovered body building when I was 21 while in Paraguay. So I sculpt my body out of hard work and kindness. I have gratitude and respect for my body and for other sentient beings. Eating ethically and training hard is my religion.
5. Greatest challenge in the next years?
The greatest challenge in the coming years will be the effects of climate change. I have lived in New York for 20 years but I was born and grew up in Australia. Australia in on fire. The Great Barrier Reef, that I swam in as a teen has lost almost all it’s color, koala bears now face extinction (along with 200 species of plants and animals per day). And here on the lower east side of Manhattan, the sea levels are rising. 8 years ago I lived through hurricane Sandy. I was evacuated from my apartment missed the flood water by 1inch, my studio/gallery TBG missed the water by 3 feet. In 2020 NYC is closing The East River park to build a 10 foot ocean wall to protect us from rising waters.
I am a survivor. I was supposed to be dead by 30, instead I had 35 year long career and had a baby at 45. I have kinda worked out how to survive while maintaining being free.
Most of us chase the dollar to survive and that has diverted most if not all our focus from knowing, developing and sharing what we are born to do, living who we really are. I hope I can be of service to millions of people like myself who were born into and bred on capitalism, by showing how to live without it, how to shake the parasite.
6. What you’d tell your 15-year old self?
I am still am my 15 year old self. I have not changed that much. I still wear the same size clothes have a similar style, figure hugging, simple, with punk edge. I am still vegetarian, still painting, witting, still athletic. I think I have been 15 for 35 years. I feel clearer but still hormonal and hotheaded. I think I am interning for me, LOL. I would probably tell my self (with trepidation, because I know I do not like being told what to do), "Go for it, do what I want, the way you want” But I know I would any way.
7. What we should know about the work you do to erase he so called beauty standards.
Youth, beauty, even physical normalcy fade BUT TALENT IS FOREVER. My work is not directly commenting on beauty myths and standards. I had one writer say much of my work is about sex and that my performance art is erotic. My primary interest is about getting to the truth of life, it’s meaning and purpose. I have never been naked in performance but many say I have. People see what they want and need to see. Suggesting vulnerability is laying bare enough. People have commented on how brave I am to perform with my body, but I am not afraid or ashamed, my quest is well beyond superficiality, my body is a magical implement and I am going to use it. To me piercing truth is beauty, decay is beautiful (that includes aging), and anything that does not biodegrade is NOT. Neither makeup, money nor all the couture and cosmetic surgery can buy beauty, they can only copy it.
I am aware it has only been my generation and the one before where woman could dedicate their lives to their work not to a man or finding romantic love. I thank the suffragettes and the feminists who paved the way for my freedom to carve my own life.
In BRIDE my 2016 performance I married nature’s force. For 33 years my primary relationship has been with painting. I rose (in a harness)17 feet in the La plaza community garden’s willow tree and did a 17 foot painting & a 12 foot painting beneath me. My commitment is to painting, letting natures forces work through me.
8. Words to live by …..
‘Build the boat, the ocean will come' Rumi
'Identity only exists if it holds you back.' TB
‘Fascism begins at breakfast.’
‘My body is my temple.’
‘Rest when you dead.’
9. Legacy you hope to leave
We want to live forever, be remembered. We fear death, of vanishing without a trace. Value is hinged on how long things will last not how graciously they will fall apart. I aim to remind us of the ultimate security - impermanence.
To make art history your work must be archival not bio-degrade. How can creative freedom be environmentally brutal? Artists are not exempt from healing the planet. I began using trashed wood fragments to paint on in 2001, my hair as a brush in 2008, earth as pigment in 2011 and single-use plastic bags for mark making in 2019.
Through my life s work I want to deepen our understanding of struggle, changing the assumption that it is a negative force. Aging, illness, decay, difference, struggle is not to be avoided but to be entered into, as gateway. Entering a gateway, like staring at blank canvas before making the first mark is a terrifying thrill - what life is all about.
If the East Village is not flooded out and if the city of Sydney does not burn to the ground and my website says up, I will leave a legacy of a thousand paintings, thirty performance films, one published book THE DIVINE MISTAKE, and my new manuscript that I plan to publish in 2021. But it is all stuff, and it all may be lost. If I am to be remembered without objects maybe by these words CELEBRATE BREATHING and THE OPPOSITE TO DEPRESSION IS GRATITUDE and OWNERSHIP IS A LIE.
10. What gives you hope for the future?
I have great hope for the planet, over time (thousands if not millions of years) she will regenerate, and new sentient life will evolve. I have diminishing faith in humanity prolonging its stint on earth. We can not heal the planet if we believe in human supremacy. Despite awareness that single use plastics are lethal, we still manufacture almost everything with it. And now the threat of war. US military when at war, or even preparing for war is the #1 contributor to climate change and user of fossil fuels. War will push humility off the edge. My son Sparrow, my valentines gift, born February 13, 2014 is nearly six. Will humanity become extinct, will he live to sixty?
Nature is merciless and magnificent. To live harmoniously with that sheer power is a privilege. We are walking a fine line and seem to have forgotten who is the boss.
11 What are the words closing your self written love letter?
Theresa, you are nature, the wind ever free, I breath you.