Broken Shells As My Armour
Behind the Fragility Suit & The Fragility Performance
This year, I feel like I am living my dream. A dream that, for the longest time, I felt like I wasn’t allowed to have. One that felt impossible to have. And here I am, becoming, embodying, and moving through this dream, as it becomes bigger, brighter, and bolder.
I have been making new work, showing my work, and have been in and am in, multiple group shows across the country. On September 12th, I will be performing the Fragility Performance at The Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago. This will be my first time performing with an audience. It is followed by an artist talk (also my first one) with Dr. Rikki Byrd, the curator of the exhibition Mark Me Too: Five Artists, an exhibition I am currently showcasing, 12 Fragility Suits, the 8mm film, Eileen’s Daughters, and 4 of my eggshell paintings.
In honor of this special milestone (my first live performance), this Artletter dives into the Fragility Performance and how the Fragility Suit came to be.
Kerry James Marshall once said the role of the artist is….
”simply to point at things…you show people things that they might not have taken the time to look at until you put it into a form that gave them the opportunity to think about”.
I hope that you never look at a brown egg the same way again ;)
With Love,
Ciarra K. Walters
The year I started collecting brown eggshells…
was one day in early 2021. My roommate Julia was showing me a carton of eggs she had bought from the farmer's market. They were these beautiful shades of brown lined up perfectly in a carton. And somehow I immediately felt a connection. It felt like I was seeing a brown egg for the first time. I couldn’t stop thinking about them. The funny thing is, I don’t even like eggs like that. I overate them in college and can’t stand the smell of them ever since. But there was something about those brown eggs.
I asked Julia and my other roommates if they could save their shells for me. I didn’t know what I would do with them, but after working as a studio assistant for the artist, Lisa C Soto, I learned the importance of collecting materials you feel called to. Even if you don’t know what you’re going to do with it or why you’re collecting it, if you feel called to it, you gotta collect it (shout out Lisa). Before I knew it, I got my house, my friends, and my family to start saving their brown eggshells for me —and eventually from strangers across the country.
I was in a fragile state when I first started collecting them. I was back in LA after a terrible year in quarantine, and I knew my time at Sunnyside (the name of our house) was ticking away. During the lockdown in 2020, my mother was undergoing chemotherapy in the house, which meant we had to take extreme precautions to limit any exposure to COVID-19 and also had to witness her body take on these harsh drugs (my sisters and I were her caretakers too). When I returned to LA, she was in remission, but I knew…this would be my last return.
After witnessing how quickly people died in the pandemic and how quickly my mother was dying, life felt more fragile than that thin thread cut by
Atropos in Hercules. I felt like I was walking on eggshells. Like I couldn’t place both feet on the ground because I didn’t know what was about to happen next. With the world, with my mom, with my career. When I spoke about this feeling to the women around me, I discovered they, too, felt like they were walking on eggshells. From their love lives, family, friends, work, and everyday lives, we were all hypervigilant and walking on our tippy toes in all aspects of life.
I looked at my brown little shells and thought, “How could I take walking on eggshells to the next level?” As a performance artist who uses the body as a material, I already knew. I wanted to wear the eggshells. At that time, I didn’t know how I could, nor did I have the space to experiment, so that idea was shelved and would come back around a year and a half later.
The Studio
As an MFA student, you receive a studio (in most cases), and it had only been a few days since I got mine. It was my first time having a studio outside of my home, and I knew exactly what I was going to make first. On September 9, 2022, I brought in two pairs of nude pantyhose, dozens of cartons filled with half-cracked eggshells, and a glue gun. I was blasting a Kaytranada mix, gluing the shells to the hose, in my studio, in grad school. It felt like a dream.
Once I finished gluing, I pinned the pantyhose to a wall. I remember looking at it and thinking, “Wowwwwww. I am making sculptures. This thing that I made looks like a sculpture.” A few weeks into grad school, my practice was evolving.
After a week of looking at this sculpture on the wall, I decided I was ready to wear it.
I put it on and started doing my meditative movements (the repetitive movements I do in all my performances), but it didn’t look or feel right. I stood there for a minute and then it hit me. I was going to walk into the wall. I wanted to crush every single eggshell on that suit. So that’s what I did. I walked into the wall for 4 minutes, ramming into it, pressing my body against it, slowly leaning on it. It was just me, the wall, and the shells. After the performance, I pinned the shattered suit to the wall, and before I knew it, I was making more.
During my two years in grad school, I gravitated toward wearing the suit when I literally felt my most fragile. Like the time I put it on the day before my mom’s birthday (the first birthday without her). I remember feeling like I was going crazy in my studio. I was just so…mad. My body felt like it was buzzing with electricity, and at any second, everything in me was going to explode. Anytime I had the urge to wear the suit, this chaotic feeling took over my body. My thoughts always led to, “Fuck this, I am putting this suit on.” I needed to break apart, and I wanted to feel it.
For the next two years, that chaotic feeling always crept back in around holidays, birthdays, and any other time I was having a “bad” day or feeling fragile. And that’s when I put the suit on.
I have done the Fragility Performance over 15 times. The majority of them were impulsive performances in my graduate studio, but six are documented on 35mm film, including one performance with my three sisters. I recently did a Fragility Performance this past June in Brooklyn, New York, at Contro Studios, which was my first time performing since I graduated last spring. (big shout out to Contro!).
There are three Fragility Performances where I put the suit on outside in nature (in the woods, by a lake, and in and by an ocean). You can hear me talk more about this work in my Good Black Art interview and hear more about my 7-mile hike in the Fragility Suit in this Instagram Reel.
I have so much more to share, but until then, here are some things I’ve learned from these performances.
Lessons From the Performance & the Suit
1. I made this suit as a way to acknowledge my fragility. Everything about us is fragile. Our time, memories, emotions, beliefs, feelings, and existence. It is all fragile. So why do we shun that word, and why do we run away from it? When I put this suit on, I can visually see and physically feel how fragile I actually am. It’s like when you say something out loud for the first time and it suddenly becomes real. You start to feel lighter, like that thought isn’t holding you down so much. Putting the suit on has that same effect on me. All those emotions and thoughts I have about my anxiety and fears fall away (even if it’s temporarily) once I put that suit on, it falls away.
2. We have to break apart to become something new. The egg and its shell have many phases of life. The shell is created, cracked, and crushed until it is dust. Our journey as humans is no different. We come from dust and we will return to dust. The Fragility Suit allows me to break apart, to let go. I always feel lighter after I walk into the wall.
3. If we acknowledge our own fragility and treat ourselves like the fragile beings we are, it creates space and gives us empathy for other people and their fragile selves.
Upcoming Performance:
Mark Me, Too: Five Artists is on view until December 14, 2025. My work fills up the first room in the gallery ;)
so thrilled to be witness to you living your dreams 🤎🥚