Birds

Birds connect Clare’s adult artistic practice to one of her most intimate childhood memories with Henry. They appear first as the uneasy subject of her ambitious work, then as museum specimens and images gathered around a book she remembers as the first she loved. Across these appearances, birds carry both wonder and longing: they are creatures to be observed, touched, and imagined in flight, as well as the figures through which Clare gives shape to an emotion she initially struggles to name.

Birds in Clare’s Art

When Clare describes her studies at the School of the Art Institute, she says she has been doing sculpture and has recently begun papermaking. Asked what her work is like, she hesitates: it is large, she explains, and “it’s about.. .birds.” Her discomfort is visible in her downward glance and the sip of tea she takes afterward. The birds are not simply a subject she announces with confidence; the pause around them suggests that the work is bound to something more personal than its scale or medium.

Clare soon clarifies that the work is really about longing. She remains unwilling to look toward the person asking, and the conversation shifts to her family. That transition leaves the relation between birds and longing suggestive rather than fully explained: the art gives longing a form, but Clare does not yet elaborate what the birds mean to her. The image therefore enters the conversation as both a concrete artistic subject and a guarded disclosure.

The Museum Encounter

Birds return in a remembered museum visit with the young Henry. The collection surrounds them with different forms of preservation and display: birds in simulated flight, birds perched on branches, bird heads and skins. Clare opens one of many drawers and finds glass tubes containing tiny gold-and-black birds, each labeled with its name around a foot. Henry’s eyes widen at the sight. When Clare asks whether he wants to touch one, he agrees, and she removes the cotton from a tube and shakes a goldfinch onto her palm.

The specimen remains shaped like the tube that held it. Henry strokes its small head lovingly and asks whether it is sleeping. His response gives the preserved bird a tenderness and apparent presence that its fixed, fragile condition cannot confirm. The scene does not treat the collection as a simple display of natural history: Henry’s touch makes the bird an object of care, while its stillness leaves the boundary between sleep and death unspoken.

Audubon’s Birds of America

Clare next brings Henry to Audubon’s Birds of America, a deluxe double-elephant folio in a case. The copy is described as the finest in existence, and Clare has spent many rainy afternoons admiring it. She lifts the enormous volume onto felt and opens it for Henry, who stands on a chair so he can see. Its first plate is the Common Loon, which Henry reads aloud and compares to a duck. The exchange makes the book an occasion for looking together rather than a lesson delivered from a distance.

Clare turns the pages slowly, withholding their visual surprises until each new image appears. She points out a Great Blue Heron, bigger than a flamingo, and tells Henry she saw hummingbirds that day. When he asks if they were in the museum, she says they were; she contrasts the images in the book with the hummingbird outdoors, whose rapidly beating wings look like a blur. The movement she describes sets living flight against the fixed engravings and the tube-shaped specimen encountered earlier.

Page by page, the book becomes a sequence of discoveries. Henry waits attentively for each bird and makes small sounds of pleasure as they reach the Sandhill Crane, American Coot, Great Auk, and Pileated Woodpecker. Turning each enormous sheet is compared to making a bed: paper rises up and over, and the next image arrives gradually. That unhurried handling turns the folio’s physical scale into part of the encounter, allowing anticipation as well as the pictures themselves to hold the child’s attention.

At the final plate, the Snow Bunting, Henry bends down and delicately strokes the engraving. Clare looks from Henry to the book and remembers this moment as part of her memory of the first book she loved, recalling that she once wanted to crawl into it and sleep. The scene binds her recollection of childhood reading to Henry’s careful touch: the book is at once a vast collection of bird images, a material object between them, and a place of imagined shelter.

Longing, Wonder, and the Book

The movement from Clare’s large bird-themed artwork to the childhood folio does not supply a single, explicit explanation of what every bird signifies. Instead, the narrative places her account of longing beside a memory whose emotional force comes through gestures and attention: Henry’s astonished eyes at the specimens, his gentle stroking, and the patient turning of the pages. The connection is supported by juxtaposition rather than by a declared symbolic key.

The birds also occupy distinct material states. Some are preserved in tubes or displayed as skins and parts; others appear as engravings; hummingbirds are remembered as living creatures whose wings blur with speed. These differences matter to the scene’s sense of wonder. The specimens invite contact but remain still, the book makes birds available to sustained looking, and Clare’s description of outdoor hummingbirds insists on motion beyond the page. By bringing these forms together, the memory gives her later artistic subject an intimate history while preserving its central feeling as longing rather than resolving it into a fixed meaning.