Journal Entry: 5/13/26

There are gestures we learn as children and repeat without much thought. A finger drawn across the chest, a stem threaded and linked to another, a hand cupped outward to receive a gift or a quiet phrase repeated. These actions are often unconscious, but through them our beliefs, fears, wishes, and desires are carried outward, even just for an instant, from within.

These fleeting moments resist language. They are marked, instead, by ritual and gesture. With that in mind, we invite you to consider the ties binding us and the fragile forms they take. In May 2026, Egg Collective presents Cross Your Heart, pairing our latest designs with new works by artists Hiroko Takeda, Joshua Vogel, Molly Haynes, Taylor Kibby, Ariel Dearie, and Rodger Stevens. In different ways, each of these artists’ attend to the subtle exchanges between hand and material, touching on the intimate and delicate act of both form making, and meaning making.

The exhibition title, Cross Your Heart, references a phrase learned in childhood: "cross my heart, hope to die..." A vow both solemn and soft, this childish promise is made not through contract, but through shared belief and trust. Cross Your Heart presents a collection of works that suggest devotion without declaring it, connection without fixing it, and meaning that is present even as it wilts away.

Ah Sun-flower! weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the Sun:
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the travellers journey is done.

Where the Youth pined away with desire,
And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow:
Arise from their graves and aspire,
Where my Sun-flower wishes to go

— William Blake

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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