"We keep coming back to a green frog.

Green frogs are genuinely gender-fluid. Biologists find frogs whose chromosomes and whose bodies flatly disagree. It isn't unnatural or uncommon. It's part of what the species knows how to do. Nature was never as strict as we have to be, always advanced, always working out what it needs to survive and be magnificent.

The Muppets raised us. Felt, foam, glue, visible seams, a hand you're asked not to think about. That's where we learned that magic and craft are the same thing—somebody sits up all night with a glue gun so a frog can be alive by morning. We still work that way. Everything here is hand-sewn, sequin by sequin, weeks of it.

Kermit gave us two songs. Bein' Green, 1970: a kids' song about a colour you didn't choose, one that makes you vanish or stand out wrong—and then it turns, and green is beautiful, and green is what I want to be. Then 1979, one frog on a log with a banjo, singing Rainbow Connection for the lovers and the dreamers. A year earlier Gilbert Baker had raised the first rainbow flag in San Francisco. Two rainbows, twelve months apart, out of the same hunger. A hunger to be seen as a lover, a dreamer, a free and bright beautiful creation of your own making.

We make our frogs out of light. Long exposures, drawn in the dark, so the body arrives glowing—a queer, luminescent nature, sequinned and swampy and lit from inside.

They're green because green grows anyway, in the wet dark, where nobody's maintaining anything. They're covered in sequins because being looked at can be survived and then enjoyed. And they're joyful because joy was never the soft option for people like us. It's the work." — The Huxleys