Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Barbara Lane Tharas. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Barbara Lane, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. So let’s jump to your mission – what’s the backstory behind how you developed the mission that drives your brand?
Barbara Lane Tharas (they/them) is an artist living and working in Emporia, Kansas. Tharas received their Bachelor of Fine Arts from Texas A&M-Corpus Christi in 2016. They have exhibited nationally over the last eight years, including five solo exhibitions and numerous juried exhibitions. Tharas creates work that is motivated through sequences such as comics, animation, and printmaking. They use printmaking and comicing as a way to create work that utilizes humor to critique socially stigmatized bodies, mental health, and create an opportunity for solidarity. Laughter as a tool for overcoming shame, is Tharas’ most significant motivation when creating art. Their mission is drawing and sharing what they draw with as many folx as possible. Tharas’s most current body of work is influenced by contemporary animators and illustrators. They continue to use narrative and sequence through their work and by using this format they are able to create a voice to fight against fatphobia, beauty and gender norms, and stigma towards individuals who have experienced trauma.
Barbara Lane, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I have borderline personality disorder, which means I sometimes struggle to regulate my intense feelings and emotions. I have been working with a trauma therapist to improve my regulation, and I am much better now. However, I have faced multiple life struggles that have made it difficult for me to trust. Those struggles include the adults in my family allowing a forty year old pedophile to groom and marry my teenage cousin when we were kids, my other cousin taking his own life as an adult, my brothers and I enduring physical and emotional violence from our dad our whole childhoods, unstable living situations, and I was in a psych hospital for two weeks in 2018 after a bad break up and experiencing self harm as well as suicidal ideation. In recent years I have relapsed on self harm, but it is something I am getting better at through emotional regulation techniques.
My artwork and the characters and stories I create are ways of expressing these difficult experiences.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
In December of 2017, I had a really bad break up. I was suicidal and self – harming and was taken to an emergency room where they sent me to a Psych Hospital for two weeks. I got an incredible amount of help there, and three months later, I had two solo shows that I created two completely new bodies of work for. One of them was at Green Light Coffee Shop and the other was at the K Space Gallery gift shop in Corpus Christi Texas. During that three months I also wrote three songs and recorded them on Youtube. I haven’t listened to them since, because I’m scared of being triggered and taken back to that time. But I am really proud of how prolific I was shortly after hitting rock bottom, and I am still very proud of that work I created.
The work that showed at the coffee shop, “April Showers”, was a series of pink painted found wood pieces from my grandma’s backyard. At the time I was living in her converted garage apartment, I had no money, and I had no job. So I had to be resourceful and use materials that I already had or found. This was during the “Me Too Movement” and there were stories happening everywhere about bad men hurting women in major ways. At that time, my cousins were revealing to me all the major ways that a pedophile, Roland Garza, (who married and impregnated their older sister at the age of seventeen and had been grooming her since she was twelve) had hurt them and their family dynamic throughout the years. I was livid about all of the abuse I was hearing about, near and far. I poured all of my rage about the abuse into this work. I drew a nude gender-ambiguous character, who represented me, onto paper and collaged them onto the wood kicking and punching flowers into the rosy pink ether. The flowers were found in my grandma’s backyard and I sealed the pressed pedals to the painted pink wood using PVA glue. It was a series of about thirty small collages. Instead of using d-rings or eye-screws and proper hanging wire, I used found wire and regular screws to create hanging rigs on the back of each one, and it totally worked. My feelings and ideas behind this series were violent. I wanted to inflict violence on all of the bad men, especially the pedophile Roland Garza, who obliterated any sense of safety in my family. It felt good to express these feelings of violence in a non-violent, public way. I sold several pieces, and the show was a huge success.
The show that took place at K Space Contemporary, “Seattle’s Hike,” was meant to represent the rage I felt about the recent break and the abandonment and betrayal I felt toward that person who left me. At the time, I did not know that I had Borderline Personality Disorder, I just knew that I had intense emotions that I virtually could not regulate in a healthy way. Making art about it was really the only way I knew how to express it that was considered socially acceptable. Behind the scenes, I was trying to get back with my ex through phone calls and when they would reject me, I was slamming doors, screaming, and self-harming. Seattle is a character that I created. She is a 9-year girl, and her parents are neglecting her because of their new baby, her little sister, Nancy. Seattle decides one day to go into the woods after school and hike indefinitely. She enjoys the violence of trying to survive. She enjoys the physical pain of hiking and is surprised by the pain of hunger and dehydration. After being dehydrated, she hallucinates and passes out on a cliff. The story is left open-ended, and the reader is not sure if she dies or not. This story was displayed in a series of wood panels exhibiting sequential collage work. The collages were arranged like picture books or comics, with the characters and backgrounds. The characters, narrative texts, and word bubbles were collaged drawings and handwritings on notebook paper that I ripped out and applied to the panel using PVA glue. The backgrounds of each panel were mostly painted with acrylic paint, but some included collaged forest scenery that I cut out from old magazines. I also included real pressed flowers and ferns collected from my Grandma’s property using PVA glue and wax paper. This series of fifteen large panels rendered moments or snapshots of Seattle leaving school, walking alone through a forest, hunting and eating a rabbit, sleeping under a makeshift tent, and becoming dehydrated, all while cursing her family using vulgar, hateful words. She finally stops being hateful when she hallucinates and passes out. This visual short story said a lot about how I viewed myself and my life at the time. Being unconscious and/or inebriated was the only relief I knew at the time, and everything felt painful. However, having these shows and selling my work was a tremendous source of feeling accepted and seen by the art community and that meant a lot to me during that dark time.
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
In the summer, fall and winter of 2019, I was living with my cousin and her son in a two bedroom apartment. We were very poor, but we were making it work. I had recently been kicked out of my Grandma’s house for giving the middle finger to the pedophile at a stop sign. All of the elders in the household enabled the pedophile without regret, and all of us kids suffered. So my cousin and I left, and started a new life in this apartment. I worked full time at a coffee shop and my only modes of transportation were my bicycle and Uber/Lyft. I often didn’t have enough money for Ubering so I mostly rode my bike for miles each day just to get to where I needed to be. Corpus Christi was not a bicycle friendly city either. It was rough to survive that way. I would get cat-called often. This did not help my mental health and I would end up having BPD outbursts and screaming curse words at the cars that cat called me. I didn’t have money to afford a bed, and I slept in a sleeping bag on the floor each night. This is also when I began using alcohol and cigarettes to unwind at the end of the day. The sense of relief I experienced from this habit was profound for me, and I started to really lean on it. I started having drinks during the day to cope with physical pain of riding my bike so much in the wind and rain and also to cope with the anxiety I felt when my roommate cousin quit her job and decided not to look for a new one. My cousin eventually left me high and dry, left the apartment, and took all her things. She went back to the household scorched by the pedophile’s path and all the pedophile-enabling elders. She verbally condemned me for leaving our toxic family. It was painful and stressful. Even with my full time job at the coffee shop, I could not afford an apartment by myself. I reached out on social media to try to find a new roommate and got no hits. My solutions were disappearing.
Finally, I reached out to my best friend who I previously lived with in undergrad. They lived in Emporia, Kansas. We missed each other very much, and we decided that I would move in with them and their husband and cats to Kansas. A couple weeks later, they drove from Kansas to Texas to pick me up. I abandoned the apartment, stuffed all of my belongings into their Kia van, and left that hell hole. My life has taken a turn for the best ever since the day I left Corpus Christi. Living with Steph and Joe has been a colossal gift. I owe my whole life to them. Today, we are all a throuple. We make a phenomenal team and all love each other very much. They are my whole life.
Living in Emporia has allowed me to grow as a person and as an artist. I work with an awesome trauma therapist who has helped me to regulate my emotions so successfully. I now participate in Emporia First Friday Artwalks; I’ve had a solo show, “A Girl Named Seattle”, this past January at the Emporia Art Center; I table at KC Zine Con and Paper Plains Zine Fest in Lawrence. I am more active in the arts than I have ever been, and I even teach Basic Drawing at Emporia State University. I am also planning to apply for grad school at KU in Lawrence for fall of 2024. I love my life, and I am incredibly grateful for everything I have now. And it’s all because I took a risk to leave everything I knew on December 19, 2019. I placed all my trust in Steph and Joe after I had been tricked and abandoned repeatedly by the people closest to me. It took a lot of courage to leave, and it also came out of desperation. I felt severely vulnerable and unconfident in myself and my judgement and Steph and Joe saved me from that. Steph and Joe helped me to quit my alcohol abuse, and their patience and consistency showed me how to trust and feel safe again. Now, I’m not just trying to survive, I’m building a life with them and that is the most profound feeling I have ever felt.
Contact Info:
- Website: barbaralanetharas.com
- Instagram: @bltcomicz
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@barbaratharas912/videos