I paint the unity and the trauma of my ancestral path with string and my hair, long in its reach. Ink hits the water as I remember blood changing to pink in the ocean.
Sky meets the sea - a powerful place. Lines of current fade to the sky, and floating in its ocean is a smaller horizon, or is it a dilapidated raft? Families and cultures fall apart, wrecked in the ebb and flow of colonization, migration, and climate change.
I moved from Sydney, Australia, to New York in 2001, flying from Prime Minister John Howard's leadership to President George Bush's. Was I following freedom or just colony-hoping?
My ancestors left Japan and Korea and sailed to the Philippines. My Filipino great-great-great-grandmother had a son with a Spanish ship captain circa 1530. My heritage is Austronesian.
Like his father, my great-great maternal grandfather was a ship captain. He met a young Welsh woman on board the ship he sailed her and her parents to Australia on. Carolos Ga and Anne Bunyan married and had three daughters and one son. Their youngest daughter, Simplicia, my grandmother, married a young Austrian fleeing a military life; they had ten children, the youngest my mother.
My great-great-grandparents on my father's side fled Eastern Europe in the 18th century and settled on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. My great-grandfather then moved to Australia and married an Irish woman named Cora. They had a son who went on to marry Theresa Francis, of Spanish descent, and they had my father.
It has taken centuries for me to look Caucasian; losing all of my racial roots, I feel the quiet trauma of colonization and also unity with humanity in constant flux.
Ink on paper
18 by 24 inches
2024
$2,500
Ink on paper
18 by 24 inches
2024
$2,500
A description of the work
The IHaveAbody performance video,.conceptualized, written, directed, and performed by Theresa Byrnes. and filmed by Craig Youngren. This performance inaugurates the IHaveABody project - exploring the difference between being a body and having a body and focusing on the coaction of (making) art and (living) biology. The project creates art and affects biological reality. I am raising funds to make a documentary, “The IHaveABody Project,” presenting a method to change what science alone says is changeless. The future is not written in your genes but with your imagination!
