If Put in a Basket, Would You Carry Me?
(2026)
***This may be redundant to those with the privilege and capacity for transgender exposure/acquaintance, but to those without possession...“Egg: Trans slang for a person who hasn’t realized they’re trans yet…The word comes from the idea that they haven’t “cracked out of their shell”, like an egg.”
Obviously existing within this phenomena for the larger part of my god-given life, I have built my own affiliations with such an object term and such an object environment as “incubation.”
In, If Put in a Basket, Would You Carry Me? I performed an experience in utero by crocheting myself into an egg made of canvas yarn. With intention, I submitted myself once more to an enclosure of ‘potential.’
I stayed in the egg overnight and hatched in the morning.
Having the privilege of living as a successfully transgender woman in the world, I conducted this performance in the spirit of commemoration, a loving gesture to pay homage to my egg self. To celebrate her because she rightfully broke out of her egg to explore, and explore she has and explore she will.
The title of this piece alludes to a sentiment, an act, that I have frequently done, and been told not to do, in relation to my faith in love,
“Putting all of one’s eggs in another’s basket.”
With the onset of living as a woman, dating boys has made me feel alive. I have let myself want to gamble with devotion, with unprotected unlocking, with ‘potential’ itself.
With time, I have accepted the solidification of a natural part of me that thinks about (desires) help from someone with carrying my ovule load, someone who wants to bear its weight with me. For I will help carry theirs, of course, our strength combined. I decided in this performance to let the public see my egg, to show it off, and provide evidence that I have little issue carrying it myself and am highly proud of this ability, yet I still allow myself to question its ability to receive aid (i.e. the title). I’m able to walk in seven inch pleasers because love and ‘potential’ exist as pillars within myself, regardless of romance, but may stumble a bit too.
Totally self-conducted, filmed, scored, edited and produced, this piece is self-seeing at its finest.
This balance of love shared by my inner and outer world is represented by the performance’s soundtrack: an original arrangement of the two last numbers, “Funny Girl” and “My Man” from the musical, Funny Girl (1968) played on cello.
Photo taken in 2013 at the age of eleven busking for funds to go to an orchestra camp I ended up conducting a six day hunger strike at to get sent home because of how unhappy and uncomfortable I was to be living in a cabin filled with fifteen, eleven year old boys. Thank God it worked.
The cello was my first friend who could carry and transmute the entrapment I felt in utero, for I learned to play the instrument from the age of ten and have continued with it to this day. It was a constant craft I honed virtually every day for eight years. I believe I was the best cellist when I was at peak egg, sixteen. I would play, “Funny Girl” frequently, so that song being played in the first act of my performance is a perfect accompaniment to the actual enclosing of myself, whereas, “My Man,” played in the second, is a newfound fixation of mine, scoring the exploration of my being hatched. I am infatuated by how such a lyrically dramatic and finite piece about heartbreak can feel so freeing to play and to listen to while hatching.
Its tune is currently relevant to me.
I can also, of course, use my appropriated symbol of a Virgin Gaga in blue to better elaborate on this continual proof of self-seeing.
I use a photo of a fifteen year old lady gaga as a symbol. Her stare has always inspired me. She basks in her ‘potential,’ looking at you looking at her, successfully. I use this symbol to personify the many thoughts I have relating to ‘potential,’ transness, success, and love.
The virgin gaga in blue pays tribute to my most incubatory self, one who can relate to her stare and her aspirations of being unlocked. I reflectively internalize her, the self who loves (values) herself the most. And in this performance, I do acknowledge my true and ongoing desire for someone else to love her (me) too.
She is aware of this phenomena that I have found within her, the Egg that is. When “Lady Gaga Egg” is typed into Google, it shows her 2011 Red Carpet outfit from the Grammys.
“I was in the egg for three days.” (Gaga 2011)
She submitted to incubation from a place of momentary protection, a goal that I understand, seeing how an egg is inevitably asked to be cracked open, but sometimes stayed in for necessity.
Straying away from this specific performance and commenting on my practice as a whole...
I find it important to inform my audience that in recent months I have, for the most part, decided to stray away from Gaga. I believe that her trajectory has produced a rather contradictory and ugly transition, the girl in blue’s original source has now morphed into something disappointing in our contemporary world. Sellout tarnishes up the wazoo.
I don’t condone Gaga and I do not worship her. My appropriation of her image is a mechanism almost totally detached from her now in my eyes. It saddens me to have found such naive inspiration in her so early on in my artistic development and to be tied to her indefinitely, but I own this position and actively singularize, extrapolate, my attachment to her, separate from the actual her.
And I do apologize if my use of her as an egg in blue offends.
I am exploring what happens if I lose the face in my process.
It has felt freeing having it gone for now. A graduation of sorts.
Resuming now...
To symbolize ‘potential’ through material, I have continuously used canvas yarn in my practice. Crocheted, I have stretched the processed ‘potential,’ hung it, worn it, and now have been enclosed in it. I felt it important to start from square one in this performance, showing the audience how ‘potential’ is first alchemized (wound) by me. In ball form is when it exists at its highest ‘potential.’
This meta experience of enclosing myself within a material made of ‘potential,’ into a symbol for ‘potential’ itself is one that I am very proud of documenting.
Conducted on Toronto Island as a part of the Gibraltar Point Art Residency, this durational performance is an execution of one of the longest standing ideas waiting to be materialized by my artistic efforts–its chain of title is awfully long. If I didn’t have so many other longer chains percolating in my loading dock of confident craft,
I would call If Put in a Basket, Would You Carry Me? my magnum opus; although, it has now become quite obvious that the majority of my pieces warrant such a status to me.
In its execution, I turned ‘potential’ into a kinetic performance, intrinsically transitioning Painting, into Sculpture, into Costume, into Environment (a temporary home) as a means to further memorialize and canonize my devotion to self-seeing.
