Handfuls of Earth and Sky brings together three bodies of work inspired by the visionary legacy of Octavia E. Butler. Butler’s speculative writing, always grounded in the familiar, empowers readers to imagine other worlds in which to exist and thrive beyond discrimination and cruelty. She made palpable the desperation, grief, and violence of societal collapse under climate catastrophe, not as distant fiction but as urgent warning—a call to action. My engagement with her archive at the Huntington, along with reading and working with other writers, thinkers and artists, deepened this connection. There, I studied her collection of newspaper articles tracing how the media distorted the climate crisis. Her clippings reveal not only the complicity of the media with politicians and corporations, but the erasure of marginalized communities—those most vulnerable to environmental disaster.

History, if laid out like a map, would reveal more absences than certainties, a piece of paper filled with holes. So many stories have been erased, rewritten, buried, or rendered unknowable, from the distant and continued effects of settler colonialism, chattel slavery, racism, homophobia, and patriarchy.

Through collage, this work probes the camera’s fraught role in our violent histories and troubled present. Photographs are cut, torn, and burned in search of new vantage points—openings from which to glimpse a new way forward. Cracks and fissures become sites of connection: between earth and sky, between human and nonhuman, between the weight of the past and the possibility of a different future. Out of the chaos of collage emerges a constellation of themes—refusals to comply, intersectional feminism, connection, hope, and healing. By embracing disruption as both method and message, the work resists oppressive systems and imagines a world grounded in equity, collective voice, and care—for all people, animals, and the planet.