Intentionally ambiguous, this photograph questions whether the king’s men (or other public officials) are carefully gathering the country’s egg-subjects or recklessly tossing them over the wall.

Milligan began creating eggs by searching Ohio farms for ostrich eggs and using them for plaster cast molds. “I discovered this was taking an eternity and lots of plaster,” she remembers. She switched to painted papier-mâché and after a full month of egg production, transported them to a farmer’s fieldstone wall in Pennsylvania.

“It takes about 1/200th of a second to snap the shutter and take a photograph. But the conception, the creation, the setting up—that’s the most involved part of the project,” she said.