Tōsō to sōdo

Flight and freedom are embodied in the wings Clare makes for Henry after his feet have been amputated. The work does not restore his ability to stand or run; instead, it gives shape to a desire that his injured body can no longer fulfill. Suspended above the studio floor, the wings hold together opposing meanings—threat and longing, ornament and uselessness, confinement and imagined release—and become an image of freedom that remains real as art even when it cannot become physical escape.

From figure to wings

Clare begins in her studio with armature wire, drawings pinned to the wall, and a cleared worktable. She first tries to form a life-size body, shaping a torso, shoulders, ribcage, and pelvis, but rejects the figure and pushes it under the table. Starting again, she decides that she wants to give Henry only the wings. That change of scale and ambition is central to the object: she is not constructing a replacement body but concentrating the work on the possibility of flight.

She bends and weaves wire into a pair of wings, measuring a span with her arms and mirroring the second wing against the first. Once hinged together, the frame hangs from the studio ceiling, eight feet across. At this unfinished stage it is graceful and ornamental, but also explicitly useless: a structure that can evoke movement without itself carrying anyone through the air.

Making a terrible angel

Clare rejects white as the wings’ color. She chooses Red Iron Oxide, the color of dried blood, and Bone Black, preparing kozo and linen fibers for handmade paper. The material process gives the imagined angel a deliberately ambivalent character. Clare thinks a terrible angel would not be white—or would be whiter than she could make it—and pairs the dark red pigment with a second, black pigment rather than settling on a conventionally pure, radiant image.

After making sheets of paper, she drapes the damp material over the wire armature like skin. Twisted strips become sinews and cords; the underlying wire remains visible beneath the gaunt surface, and the wings take on the appearance of bat wings. Clare dries unused paper, tears it into feather-like strips, and paints them black, gray, and red, intending to sew them onto the wings one by one. Their form is thus made through laborious joining: wire, membrane, and individual feathers combine into a figure that suggests flight while retaining the marks of its construction.

The studio unveiling

A week later, Clare arranges a candlelit presentation in the studio. Gomez helps carry Henry through the back door and into the room, then leaves him on the couch. Henry notices a white sheet suspended from the ceiling and looks for a projector, but none is there. Clare, dressed in dark clothing, moves among the candles with her face and hands appearing pale against the dark room. When Henry asks for feet, Clare drops the sheet and reveals the wings.

They float and waver in the candlelight, darker than the darkness. Henry sees them as threatening, but also as carrying longing and the idea of rushing through space. Their ragged edges and silence leave him unable to speak. The scene does not claim that the wings return what he has lost. Instead, it places the image of flight before him while he remains seated, making the contrast between imagined motion and present bodily limitation part of the revelation.

Longing, release, and bodily limits

The wings revive Henry’s dreams of hovering, of being lifted from the earth to a safe distance, and of running as if running were a form of flight. In that association, freedom is not simply escape from gravity: it is also the remembered capacity to stand securely on his own feet and move. Clare’s work joins that wish to the reality of his amputation without pretending the two are interchangeable. Its beauty is shadowed by uselessness, but uselessness does not cancel what the wings communicate between them.

When Clare asks Henry to kiss her, he turns toward her and describes the moment through the language of submergence, flight, and release; he also returns to the image of being that wells up in the heart. The scene allows intimacy to become a form of emotional release without representing it as a cure. The wings remain suspended, while their meaning shifts from a constructed object to an occasion for connection and a renewed, if momentary, sense of possibility.

The dream of running

A later dream gives the motif a harsher counterpart. Henry dreams that he runs along the lake from Oak Street Beach, relieved that his heart and lungs work smoothly and that he can move freely. Then his body begins to fail in pieces: first his arms detach, then his feet break apart inside his shoes and come off at the ankles. He keeps running for a time, carrying the detached parts until he can no longer manage them, and falls face-first onto the path.

Afraid that other runners will trample him, Henry rolls toward the lake. The waves carry him under, and he wakes gasping. Against the studio’s silent, airborne wings, this dream makes bodily freedom unstable and painfully literal: the dreamed return to running becomes a sequence of losses, ending not in flight but in submersion. Together, the wings and the dream preserve both sides of the image. Flight offers Henry a language for longing and release; the dream insists on the physical limits that the image cannot erase.