An image all her own

* A local woman shares what it was like to experience and see her own body cast in The Body Image Project

Jo Byrnes met Larry Kirkwood in 1999. He'd been working on his Body Image Project for about six years at the time.

Using casts of nude bodies of all shapes and sizes, the effort is meant to explore and illustrate that bodies are beautiful because they're individual, because they don't look like the "Hollywood ideal" they're uniquely special.

Byrnes was fascinated and decided to have him make a cast of her own body in 2000.

"I saw a show like this one (held at Cottey College on Oct. 1) in graduate school," Byrnes said. Studying dance at the time (she's now a professor of dance at Cottey College), she said, "You think about your body a lot."

Kirkwood's studio is in the Kansas City area, and it so happened that her parents also lived in Kansas City at the time; "Plus, I really liked Larry," and trusted his professional approach to the project.

Byrnes was comfortable with her body, and having spent so much time working to control it and use it for dance, she "wanted to see my body objectively."

For Byrnes, it was a positive experience and quite interesting to see the form of her body in the cast, but it didn't really change the way she viewed her body.

"I think Larry was a little disappointed, but when it was done and we looked at it, he said, 'so, does it look like you?' I said, 'Yes.'" She admits her torso seemed a little long, but there were no surprises. She's always known she had a long torso.

"It was an intimate, positive experience. It's not like looking in a mirror, or looking at a picture. It's a nice experience," she said.

Her cast was part of the display at Cottey, but casts are displayed anonymously.

"I kept telling my students to go see it." Some did, and were, after some evaluation, able to identify which one was made from her body. "It's funny to me that it took them so long to find me. I wonder what it is they were using to identify me," she said.

Kirkwood said that he's done casts of other dancers -- three dance troupes, in fact, and dancers often say they wish they could have their body for dancing but another body for other things.

Byrnes expressed no such desire, but recalled that when she wrote about her experience at Kirkwood's request -- he invites all of his casting subjects to write about it for his Web site -- she wrote about stepping outside herself, to see herself in a whole different way as a rewarding and enlightening experience.

"It's not for everybody. When he was talking about how nervous some people were, I wondered why they did it," Byrnes said.

But there are many, many reasons.

Kirkwood said that one woman who was dying of cancer asked to be cast, saying that all people saw was the outside. They didn't see what was going on inside.

Kirkwood says that touches on why he keeps doing the project.

"I thought I would just do it for a while, say what I had to say. and go on," but letters began to pour in from viewers about how the project had made a real difference in their lives, and so, he continued.

He still sees that there's much to do in terms of changing the world's focus on things outward. "So I'll just keep schleping this thing around 'til it makes a difference," Kirkwood said.