Internet burnout, vulnerability, kinetic egg sculptures. Royal Young visits the studio of interdisciplinary artistic entity Lady Egg.
“The egg came long after I emerged. Before that I was really into lamps. A lot of people from Philly still call me ‘Lamp,’” says interdisciplinary artist Lady Egg. “After that, ‘Lemons.’ Because of the concept of driving a lemon. Like a shit out car. I am driving a lemon and I am the lemon. I like turning that on its head.”
Now based in Phoenix, Lady Egg maintains a studio off historic Grand Avenue that is a hyperpop explosion of her vivid technicolor canvases, kinetic sculptures, salvaged streetlights, and oversize eggs.
Stepping into her world evokes whimsy, queerness, and digital exhaustion. “I haven’t been bored in twenty years,” she says, “Being super ADHD and having a short attention span, I can always figure out a way to optimize every second of life. I’m figuring out a balance there.”
Her path to hatching in this desert environment started in the rural Pennsylvania woods, where her parents still live in the house she grew up in. From there, Lady Egg moved to Philadelphia to study sculpture at Tyler School of Art and Architecture.
“Phoenix gives me the same amount of nitty, gritty griminess that I got when I lived in North Philly, which I love. And I’ll never get tired of cactus. They all have their own little personalities.”
In 2020, Lady Egg found herself newly transplanted to the desert in pandemic lockdown, re-evaluating her relationship with social media. “I scrapped my whole Instagram in one night—seven years archived at 3 am,” she says. “That’s when the egg started.”
“I was exploring the phrase, ‘egg on my face.’ I started painting people’s portraits and putting eggs on their faces. The first one I did was Tom from Myspace.”
Lady Egg is grateful for growing up in a cusp time before social media became pervasive. “We’ve introduced this crazy scenario where your whole community is on your phone, and you’re also being served ads about what your community is, and it’s your job. It’s sad,” she says. “I like the idea of not just making mistakes—we’re all going to do that—but being on a platform and taking ownership of your mistakes,” she continues. “Being raw and real enough about it in a way that keeps things going, because we’re acknowledging that that’s a part of everybody human. It’s not something to shame and hide. I like that frame of mind when it comes to making art.”
Lady Egg’s sculptures stimulate a sense of universal playfulness, whether they’re sunny-side up eggs affixed to Tempe fences as part of a 2023 public art project, or a caved-in hard-boiled egg with a quirky devil face and red high-heeled shoes from her 2025 residency at Ah Haa School for the Arts in Colorado. “I brought him to Telluride, and on the way home the change in altitude sucked his head in. It’s the journey,” says Lady Egg.
As artists, we’re always disrupting the status quo by living and creating in the world’s fault lines.
Lady Egg’s art is also a testament to celebrating queer identity and desire in an often hostile world. “Reading Elliot Page’s memoir Pageboy, they say there are no atheists in foxholes in relation to being chased by bullies growing up as a queer teen,” says Lady Egg. “That really resonated with me. As a queer person, I don’t have a well-documented entity to pray to. But when you are in a situation where there is nothing else, where do you turn?”
While Lady Egg says a main struggle for artists in 2026 is “navigating our own worth” and being caught in a world where unbearable costs of living can make art a matter of grim survival, she feels prepared. “I’m agile enough to adapt. I think with queer community, we’ve always had to exist on the margins of society. Somebody is always trying to bulldoze our spaces. We have to explore our morality in these little alcoves of the world, and I think that’s the place to be.”
She continues, “I feel like I’m thriving, even though I’m just surviving like everybody else. That’s what we’re doing as artists, we’re always disrupting the status quo by living and creating in the world’s fault lines.”
