Journal Entry: 5/13/26

Some threads are worth following. Building on the themes of Egg Collective’s Spring 2026 exhibition of the same name, Cross Your Heart: Part II continues the inquiry into the unseen forces of history, fate, and chance that shape creative practice. Whereas Cross Your Heart: Part I explored ritual and gesture, Part II shifts its focus to the intricate, lace-like lineage of craft. Physical, intuitive, and sometimes difficult to put into words, craft is a way of thinking in itself.

In a culture that so often locates intelligence in the mind, what might we learn from the hands? Gestures and techniques alike carry histories, preserving forms of knowledge that might otherwise be lost. Through touch, repetition, and a deep familiarity with material, the hands of a maker become vessels for knowledge accumulated over generations.

Cross Your Heart: Part II unveils new works by Egg Collective, Natalie Weinberger, Joshua Vogel, Kiva Monty, and Caroline Blackburn in a dialogue across materials, forms, and traditions. The works hold a certain kind of magic: the alchemical knowledge of a maker’s hands. Evoking connections between the fragile and the enduring, the ornamental and the protective, the familiar and the mysterious, they present objects as repositories of knowledge, memory, and meaning.

Like the ritual that gives Cross Your Heart: Part II its name, the exhibition asks us to consider the mystical power of the hand in motion: carving, cutting, sewing, throwing, casting, conjuring. Each action a kind of sleight of hand, through which the invisible takes form.

Autumn

The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up,
as if orchards were dying high in space.
Each leaf falls as if it were motioning "no."

And tonight the heavy earth is falling
away from all other stars in the loneliness.

We're all falling. This hand here is falling.
And look at the other one. It's in them all.

And yet there is Someone, whose hands
infinitely calm, holding up all this falling.

Palm

Interior of the hand. Sole that has come to walk
only on feelings. That faces upward
and in its mirror
receives heavenly roads, which travel
along themselves.
That has learned to walk upon water
when it scoops,
that walks upon wells,
transfiguring every path.
That steps into other hands,
changes those that are like it
into a landscape:
wanders and arrives within them,
fills them with arrival.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who was for a time Rodin's secretary, wrote: "There are among the works of Rodin's hands, single small hands, which without belonging to a body, are alive. Hands that rise, irritated and in wrath; hands whose five bristling fingers seem to bark like the five jaws of a dog of Hell."

A letter from co-founder Crystal Ellis:

It is April 16th, 2026. In less than a month, Cross Your Heart will open. This morning, after breakfast, my two-year-old daughter and I stepped outside. She wanted to inspect the spring flowers, just now unfolding their delicate petals. I watched as she examined a small branch from a flowering tree nearby and let my mind wander backward. Like pages turning. Back. Back. Back...

Back to my childhood…

Back to a peony unfolding in my mother’s garden in Illinois, a single ant traversing its petals, still wet with rain.

Back to clovers in the grass that clung to my toes as I ran barefoot in the summertime.

Back to pinky swears, and flower chains, and that childish phrase “cross my heart and hope to die” whispered with utter sincerity. Meaning simply — I promise. You can trust me.

A motion.
An action.
A flower.

Each a token of friendship, love or fleeting affection. Each connected to the heart —the place within us that feels nearest to the sacred. And yet, what I was echoing in those moments, without knowing, was something much older.

To cross one’s heart is thought to stem from the Christian gesture of tracing the sign of the cross across the chest, a way of calling truth into the body and placing one’s words under witness. Over time, the gesture softened, passing from ritual into playground, from oath into game, until it became a child’s earnest insistence that what is said must be believed.

The heart is true.

Flowers are another fragile promise. Looped stem through stem into chains, woven into crowns, or arranged as an adornment worn close to the body, each connection held in place by care alone.

For centuries, flowers gathered from fields and gardens have marked affection, courtship, friendship, mourning, and devotion. Made not from rare materials, but from what was abundant and at hand, these ephemeral objects were worn, gifted, and forgotten, often fading by day’s end.

Still, they meant something.

There is a particular kind of promise made in these small acts — unwritten, unrecorded, and often unkept. Not the binding oaths of ceremony or contract, but softer offerings. Gestures that hold meaning not because they endure, but because they are made at all.

To cross your heart. To weave a chain of flowers. To blow a kiss. To bind something, briefly, and believe in it while it lasts.

Cross Your Heart : Complete Works

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