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Promotional art for Don't Touch My Trinkets
Cover image credit: via TMDB

Don't Touch My Trinkets

Emma Holland

YouTube · 2026 · 59 min

A personal art gallery built from petty grudges and homemade sculptures.

Watch it free on YouTube (opens in a new tab)

Released , on YouTube.

Emma Holland has an art degree from the Australian National University and a specific grievance about people who stare too long at ornate tea sets in galleries. Her solution is to turn the stage into her own personal exhibition, complete with plinths, homemade props, and a strict list of rules: no touching, no oversized bags, no fountain pens, and no flash photography.

The setup sounds polite until she starts unveiling the exhibits, which are mostly monuments to people who annoyed her. One painting depicts an angel giving the middle finger to a sexist Uber driver named Richard while Robbie Williams plays. A ceramic piece commemorates an awful date with a magician, and a clay sculpture turns her husband into Nosferatu, a project she had to explain out loud to the clerk at Eckersley’s art supply store. Between the visual pieces, she works in a running fitness test around the room, a bit about having aphantasia, a feud with her tech operator, and a story about a Taskmaster Australia producer sucking on her toe.

There is an actual argument buried under the craft supplies about whether artists have a right to turn real people into material, though the show never gets precious about it. Reviewers from the 2025 Melbourne and Edinburgh festival runs noted how easily Holland hides a petty, dark streak behind a bright, upbeat stage presence, tying the callbacks together at the end through crowd work.

Holland uploaded the 58-minute special to YouTube on March 30, 2026, following a five-city Australian tour, an Edinburgh Fringe run at Assembly George Square, and her win on Taskmaster Australia in 2025. By the time the video went up, she was already moving on to her next touring hour, The Dog Dies at the Start.

Notable bits & set list

6 bits

  1. Beep test stage entrance

    Opens the show by sprinting back and forth across the stage to the recorded prompts of a multi-stage fitness test.

  2. Audience hand-binoculars gallery zoom

    Instructs the crowd to make circles with their hands and raise them to their eyes to zoom in on a small monkey trinket on stage.

  3. Capitoline Wolf sculpture in Rome

    Recalls being scolded by a security guard at age eight for touching the Romulus and Remus wolf statue, comparing bronze high art to internet pop culture and imagining how disrespectfully it would be treated outside an Australian supermarket.

  4. Primary school choir rivalry and angel painting

    Recounts a lingering grudge against a childhood peer who took a Robbie Williams choir solo from her, accompanied by a painting of an angel.

  5. Philip-Lorca diCorcia court case and ethics in stand-up

    Uses a landmark street photography lawsuit to question whether a comedian has the moral right to exploit real people, such as a sexist Uber driver or a childhood classmate, without their consent.

  6. Sculpting her husband as Nosferatu

    Discusses the awkward social interaction of buying clay at Eckersley's and being forced to truthfully explain her unusual art project to the clerk.

How it plays

Tone
Silly, absurd, irreverent, smart, and playful.
On stage
Puckish, silly, partly petty and self-centered like a child, alternating between goofy charm and wild-eyed theatrical vexation while spoofing the supreme ego of the artist.
Pace
Rapidly paced and energetic, punctuated by physical sprints, intrusive thought-like quick gags, multimedia cues, and deliberate pauses for longer stories.
About
art history and gallery culture, ethics of artistic exploitation and consent, childhood grudges and personal nemeses, casual sexism, visual arts and crafts

What the critics said

Critics lauded the show as smart and silly in equal measure, praising Holland's mastery of combining highbrow artistic treatises on exploitation with absurd physical clowning, tight pacing, and multimedia storytelling.

In the room: Sold-out, engaged, and enthusiastically participating in visual and physical interactive gags.

Summed up from reviews, articles and listings. Sources: comedy.co.uk, filmdb.co.uk, comedyfestival.com.au, chortle.co.uk, indailysa.com.au, squirrelcomedy.com, scotsman.com, en.wikipedia.org, festmag.com, themoviedb.org.

Backstory

Drawing on her visual arts degree, Holland frames her stand-up set as a guided tour through her own curated personal art gallery on stage, examining art history, personal grievances, and the ethics of exploitation and consent in artistic storytelling.

Details

Released
Runtime
59 min
Where
YouTube
Topics

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