About

I soon fell down the rabbit hole of Humpty Dumpty’s contested lore. First, the rhyme never mentions that he’s an egg. Some have stated that he is actually ale boiled with brandy, or King Richard III, or a cannon, or a clumsy person. Early visual depictions of him are a similar mixed-bag: he’s sometimes a clown, a drunkard, or a fool – still, not an egg. It was only after Lewis Caroll wrote about Humpty Dumpty in his 1871 novel, Through a Looking Glass, that his eggness was firmly popularized. And, for some reason, everyone followed suit.

There is no proof that the original author of the rhyme intended Humpty Dumpty to be an egg, yet here we are, 200-some years later, and an egg he most certainly is. He is the perfect example of the power of illustration. Narrative becomes image; image informs narrative. Now, they are so inseparable that an audience would struggle if you depicted Humpty Dumpty as anything but an egg. Now, he occupies our cultural memory in whatever form best suits us: he can be a symbol of fragility, of political instability, of absurdity, of bravado, of cowardice, of martyrdom, or even of entropy. The origin is mostly irrelevant in comparison to the symbol he has become.

Examining Humpty Dumpty is the keystone to my practice. His image is so universal, it rarely occurs to us to ask the most obvious questions: How could a human egg hybrid come to exist? Is there more than one? If so, how could they reproduce? Also, how did he manage to put that little outfit on? And who in their right mind sends horses to reassemble the shattered body of a mortally injured egg when they would clearly make things worse?

Because of the absurdity of the rhyme, even the most basic considerations are provocative. And it is with absolute joy that I get to explore them with zero accountability. After all, it never even says that he’s an egg.