I eat stars

migrations past, migrations present

Please note: this post was first posted under the title migrations past, migrations present but I have updated and edited quite a bit (26/12/24).

Image by Soco Studios, courtesy of the City of Stirling.

I’ve been planning this Substack for quite a few months now but I am often afraid of words, despite the fact I use words all the time in my visual art practice. Words feel untrustworthy to me. I feel like my words somehow shift meaning, become something different when the other person hears or reads it. Maybe it’s my neurodiversity. Still, I have a drive to connect and I bumble along and here is my first Substack post 🐣

My intention for this Substack is to be part retrospective, part bird learnings, with an occasional interview because I like an excuse to share conversations.

In this little corner, I will to consider artworks I’ve created over my 20+ year career to trace the significant threads have migrated past to present. The ideas and motifs that keep returning. These reflections will uncover what has endured, evolved, and connected, that has drift their way back and forth to become part of my creative topography.

Lately, I’ve become a bird nerd, sparked by my recent Artist Residency at Henderson Environmental Centre at Star Swamp in North Beach, WA. During this time spent immersed in a pocket of beautiful bushland, my curiosity was piqued by the birdlife. The project is called, What the Birds told me and I plan to develop this project anywhere I can record birdlife.

Gentle hours of birdwatching have profoundly shifted how I see living and dying. I won’t say it’s about the usual principles of mindfulness such as slowing down or quietude. Peregrine falcons can reach 110 km/h, faster when diving to catch prey. The male White Bellbird has a pretty good scream to attract the females, earning himself the title of worlds loudest bird.

Birds continue to surprise and delight me 🦅 🦢and this is where birding as recreation, citizen science, creative inspiration and existential thought comes to the fore. Birds, flight, wings and gravity have all migrated in and out of my thought and artwork.

As some of you know, I live with advanced breast cancer, and I navigate a 4-week treatment cycle: three weeks on, one week off. Much of my time is spent in medical settings, travelling to and from them and on telehealth appointments, between that and feeling generally ill and fatigued most of the time due to the cocktail of drugs doing a jig with the cancer itself.

The hours feel like they’re being stolen from me. Birding has become a way to reclaim some of that time—the birds have taught me that patience is life-giving. Herons teach patience, as they stand calm, still and focused before rapidly striking dinner-giving themselves and their families life.

Above: Heron, 2024, ink and watercolour.

Here’s a poem I’ve been letting slip softly through me I found in Maria Popova’s article Antidotes to Fear of Death: Astronomer and Poet Rebecca Elson’s Stunning Cosmic Salve for Our Creaturely Tremblings of Heart

ANTIDOTES TO FEAR OF DEATH
by Rebecca Elson

Sometimes as an antidote
To fear of death,
I eat the stars.

Those nights, lying on my back,
I suck them from the quenching dark
Til they are all, all inside me,
Pepper hot and sharp.

Sometimes, instead, I stir myself
Into a universe still young,
Still warm as blood:

No outer space, just space,
The light of all the not yet stars
Drifting like a bright mist,
And all of us, and everything
Already there
But unconstrained by form.

And sometime it’s enough
To lie down here on earth
Beside our long ancestral bones:

To walk across the cobble fields
Of our discarded skulls,
Each like a treasure, like a chrysalis,
Thinking: whatever left these husks
Flew off on bright wings.

Thanks for reading, if you would like to support me with a little ice cream money please visit buymeacoffee.com/clairebilliebushby and subscribe to my substack below, like and share and all those things that help get the word out there. Thank you and sending you so much gratitude.