MUDBIRD 3 CANCELLED!!- LUNGS rescheduled all performances! New date to be confirmed.

mother and son

The mother-son relationship is central to Mudbird 3.

Mudbird #1 began in 2014, when Sparrow was a baby. I wanted us to play in the mud together, feeling the power of the art-making, as pigment mixed with rain and a painting formed through our movements and gestures. I wanted to hand on the experience of nature and the force available when entering a creative zone and riding that force of nature.

When Sparrow was four, we did Mudbird #2 at Uluru National Park in Australia. We lay beneath the massive, glowing red rock and, to my surprise, our play became a sand fight.

In Mudbird 3, Sparrow is 12. I am an artist who uses a wheelchair. I was told by doctors that I would be dead by 30, and that death was likely to take me before Sparrow was 10. I immigrated to New York at 30 and gave birth to Sparrow at 45. I thought I would only ever do one Mudbird. Now the series explores the deepening and changing relationship of mother and son, the impermanence of human life, the immortality of nature spirit, and the grace of chance with the poetics of suffering.

Leia Martin plays an invisible nature spirit, or death, facilitating the action by making objects available to paint with—clay, charcoal, and flower pigment—on my body. The force communicating creative impulse through intuitôn, chance, accident. The interaction between Sparrow and me, making an art moment, is the essence.

birth, death, renewal

Birth, death, and renewal are three states often treated as separate, but in the performance they operate as a cycle.

Birth is physical, biological, and relational. It is also the beginning of a performance, the arrival of bodies into a shared space, and the creation of a temporary community around an action.

Death can refer to the end of a body, a relationship, a role, a former identity, or a previous version of the self. In performance, an action may disappear as soon as it occurs. A body changes through time. Nothing remains fixed.

Renewal is not a return to an unchanged beginning. It is a continuation through altered conditions. Material is moved, redistributed, marked, and transformed. Bodies return to the ground without becoming identical to what they were before.

The mud carries these transitions. It can be shaped and disturbed. It can dry, crack, transfer; it makes time visible through physical change.

ecology and the living site

The setting at La Plaza Cultural is an essential part of the event. A community garden is not a neutral stage. It is an active environment shaped by soil, plants, weather, maintenance, human labor, seasonal cycles, and collective stewardship.

The performance takes place among living systems and within an urban landscape. The garden connects the body to questions of land use, ecological responsibility, food systems, climate, and the survival of nonhuman life in New York City. In this context, mud is not a decorative effect. It is a reminder of material dependence. Human bodies are made of and sustained by the same larger systems often treated as separate from culture.

Byrnes’s practice has repeatedly used natural, found, reclaimed, and biodegradable materials. The garden also introduces a collective dimension. Ecological care is maintained through shared work. The performance enters an existing site of community action rather than creating an isolated setting.

Earlier work by Byrnes has also appeared within the LUNGS Harvest festival context at La Plaza Cultural, including IHaveABody and BRIDE (2016).

performance as painting

Theresa Byrnes’s work develops across painting, performance, writing, film, activism, and curation.

Painting remains a physical and conceptual foundation. Paint is moved across a surface through gesture, pressure, repetition, accident, and resistance. In performance, the surface expands. The artist’s body, clothing, ground, materials, and surrounding space become part of the composition.

The relationship between painting and performance is central to Byrnes’s broader practice. Her work often treats mistakes, instability, decay, and discarded matter as active elements rather than problems to be concealed.

Performance is ephemeral. It guides the artist’s impulse, communicated through signs, conditions, intuition, and accidents, by spirits and chances, lost in millions of creative choices. The audience is pulled into the painting zone.

Most of Theresa’s performances result in a finished painting—to be unearthed and later exhibited.

Performance remains open to physical change. The mud may behave differently according to weather, ground conditions, temperature, and the movement of the performers. The garden will not function as a fixed white cube. It will enter the work.

body, disability, and visibility

The body in Byrnes’s performance practice is not an abstract symbol detached from lived experience. It is a body with a history, a family, an age, physical conditions, limitations, capacities, and a relationship to time.

This is significant within contemporary performance art, where the body can challenge expectations about strength, productivity, beauty, gender, health, and control. The body may resist spectacle while remaining visibly present. Byrnes’s ongoing work with disability and embodiment includes the broader IHaveABody project, and in 2022 IHaveABody took form as a performance painting. That 2022 performance formed the performance painting and inaugurated the IHaveABody project and documentary. Mudbird 3 places this investigation alongside motherhood and ecological process. The body is not treated as an isolated object. It is connected to another body, to the ground, to family history, and to the conditions of the surrounding environment, the planet and cosmos.

a temporary event

Mudbird 3: Birth, Death, Renewal, Mother and Son will exist for 45 minutes. The performance will take place once, with the performers and audience sharing the same ground.

Afterward, the actions will remain through memory, documentation, traces, performance paintings like a shroud. An imprint of experience.

The work continues with Theresa Byrnes's use of live performance to examine the body as a site of transformation and relation, connecting personal experience with ecological process, family history, mortality, renewal, and the grace of chance with the poetics of suffering.

Sunday, September 27, 2026
3–4 pm
La Plaza Cultural community garden
East 9th Street at Avenue C, New York City
LUNGS Harvest Arts Festival

The event is free and open to all.

Mudbird 3: Birth, Death, Renewal, Mother and Son

On Sunday, September 27, 2026, Theresa Byrnes will present Mudbird 3: Birth, Death, Renewal, Mother and Son at La Plaza Cultural community garden, East 9th Street at Avenue C, New York City, from 3–4 pm as part of the LUNGS Harvest Arts Festival.

The performance is created by Theresa Byrnes with Sparrow Byrnes. The work continues Byrnes’s long-term exploration of the body, earth, motherhood, mortality, disability, transformation, the changing relationship of mother and son, the impermanence of human life, the immortality of nature spirit, and the grace of chance with the poetics of suffering.

event details

Mudbird 3: Birth, Death, Renewal, Mother and Son

Sunday, September 27, 2026

3–4 pm

La Plaza Cultural community garden
East 9th Street at Avenue C
New York City

Part of the LUNGS Harvest Arts Festival FREE

Performance by Theresa Byrnes
with Sparrow Byrnes

La Plaza Cultural is a living community garden and a long-standing site for ecological, cultural, and activist projects in the East Village. The setting makes the performance part of an active environment rather than placing it inside a conventional gallery.

mud, body, earth

Mud is the central material of the Mudbird series. It is earth, water, residue, covering, weight, and surface. It obscures the body and records it at the same time. It marks contact between skin and ground and carries associations of origin, burial, growth, erosion, and return.

In Mudbird, the body does not function only as an image or subject. It becomes a material within the performance. The body moves through mud, receives mud, carries mud, and leaves traces of mud behind. This places the work within contemporary performance art, live performance art, body art performance, environmental art, disability art, and process-based painting. The action is not separated from the artist’s physical presence. Time, effort, breath, balance, vulnerability, and physical limitation remain visible within the work.

The performance is not a representation of birth, death, or renewal from a distance. These conditions are approached through the body, through contact with the ground, and through the shared actions of a mother and her son.

hair as brush

Hair is central to the work. Byrnes makes large paintbrushes from her long hair and has used her own hair as a brush since 2009. She learned this ancient Aboriginal technique from her adopted Yolngu mother, Barrupu Yunupiŋu (1948–2012).

Every strand carries the precise genetic code of your lineage, acting as a physical thread connecting the present to the beginning of human time. mtDNA is passed down strictly from mother to child; the hair on your head contains a genetic sequence that can trace your maternal line back thousands of years.