27/12/2025
For 's finale, I wanted to create a character that was super personal. Captured by & ; my first incarnation of The Frog King!
Across cultures, frogs carry many symbolic meanings. Always central to my work: transformation & shapeshifting. Yet! They also appear as talismans for travellers, emblems of healing & creation, & sing the rains back to the land; thus being powerful symbols of fertility & childbirth.
Frogs also fertilise their eggs externally, releasing hundreds at once into uncertain conditions. In parallel, I undertook an emotionally taxing IVF journey, with conception & fertilisation taking place in Barcelona. Complications followed, including OHSS, which echoed frog biology: fertility unfolding outside the body, uncertain & dispersed.
After implantation, the process intensified. I was taking intensive estrogen & progesterone injections every day for about three months (much higher than typical feminising hormone therapy), which was physically & psychologically overwhelming. When the HRT ended, I began to feel more myself again, but a new awareness surfaced: as a non-binary person with a uterus, I realised my next challenge was about interpretation & identity & the cultural stereotypes around “motherhood”.
Researching the histories of non-binary & gender-diverse birthing parents was profoundly grounding for me. These roles existed across many cultures long before Western colonisation, yet remain under-documented. They felt much more authentic to my lived experience in contrast to contemporary reproductive mythologies such as “divine feminine” “maiden-to-mother” “earth mama” etc. I find these archetypes aestheticise reproduction, flatten its diversity, & turn gestating bodies into a narrow stereotyped role.
So the Frog King became a vessel for me: transformation without prescription, fertility without essentialism, & creation without confinement. A character that keeps my complexity totally intact! ♡
Performed to Todrick Hall’s “Both”: I danced, popped frog egg balloons with a syringe (ivf link), passed lilypads with eggs to the audience, & came on them as the finale.
🐸🎉
