Eco-Spirituals
California Blues: Eco-Cultural
Histories & Futures
Cyanotype / Textile / Photography / Social Practice
Process for “Sun Portal” 2024. Behind the scenes photography by Mario de Lopez.
“Our larger self,
our greater body.”
- Joanna Macy
Core Collaborators
Artist: Schessa Garbutt
Behind the Scenes Photography: William Rouse, Mario de Lopez
Artist Residencies
California Coast in Color Residency
Black Image Center
April-June 2025, Los Angeles, CA
nina Idyllwild
July 2025 (upcoming)
About
The Eco-spirituals series calls us to acknowledge our deep, interwoven relationship with the land, water, and sky. When we look out over the great blue expanse that covers 71% of our planet, we can’t help but acknowledge the parallels with our own bodies, as human brains and hearts are 73% water. The late Joanna Macy, Buddhist eco-philosopher and author, calls the Earth“our larger self, our greater body.” This series travels across California and internationally to create portraits of both land and people using iron salt pigments, local waterways, and sunlight to make life-sized, eco-friendly imprints of each ecosystem. The humans featured will be park rangers, indigenous folks, and agricultural workers who are interviewed before and after the art-making to tell stories of eco-cultural memory, conservation, and translate what the land is asking of us.
Eco-spirituals records both ecological data and myth, encoding interviews with BIPOC land stewards and research into cyanotype quilts: long-held heirlooms whose very fibers tell the story of a place and time. Black and brown folks are often the first and most affected by climate disasters and pollution due to environmental racism. The central media are large-scale cyanotype solar prints quilted with natural dye threads. The subject’s silhouettes will be punctuated with embroidered infographics and found materials that tell folklore of this sacred environment and its relationship to climate change. This series highlights that discrepancy alongside the joy and grief of sacred connection to lands that are rapidly changing, and how our care is necessary to collective thriving.
To date, I have created two large-scale prints for this series, both in Southern California. The first, “Sun Portal”, celebrated Pasadena plant life alongside myself, artist Juniper Jones, and Arlington Garden horticulturalist Capri Kasai, with the help of Juana Tiburón. The series continued in June 2025 with a self-portrait at Cabrillo State Beach: “Plastocene (eco-spiritual no. 2)”, juxtaposing my Belizean ancestry with plastic beach litter, both in deep relationship with the Pacific. I created this print in collaboration with the sun and ocean waves as a part of the California Coast in Color (Black Image Center) residency.
Currently, I am applying to state and national grants and international residencies to expand this series to ecosystems beyond Southern California’s and transform the prints into quilts.
About Plastocene (eco-spiritual no. 2)
The shoreline is a sacred space, and coastal access is a human right. Humans have always been drawn to the Ocean as a source of food, transportation, ceremony, and inspiration. In “Plastocene (eco-spiritual no. 2)” (2025), Schessa Garbutt meditates on the liminality of the shore as a site for rituals (art-making), contemplation, play, and grief. The truth is that the Anthropocene may have already been subsumed by the Plastocene, the age of Plastic. Microplastics have been found in the Baltic Sea, at the bottom of the Marianna Trench, and at the top of Mount Everest. They have been found in our reproductive organs and inside of the blood-brain barrier. Schessa made this print on-site at Cabrillo State Beach near Long Beach. They are surrounded by kelps [Macrocystis pyrifera & others] pulled from the surf as well as inorganic trash collected from the shore, including a balloon, a soda can, a shovel, a straw, mascara, fishnet stockings, a toy fan, a chunk of burnt wood, and other objects. This 5’x7’ print was Garbutt’s final project as part of the inaugural cohort of the 2025 California Coast in Color residency with Black Image Center.
About Sun Portal (2024)
“Sun Portal” (2024) is a collaborative, large scale cyanotype print directed by Schessa Garbutt and co-created with Juana Tiburón, Juniper Jones, & Capri Kasai for the inaugural Octavia’s Solstice, a summer fan festival celebrating the life, work, and wisdom of Octavia Estelle Butler in her hometown of Pasadena, CA. Garbutt designed, organized, and hosted the event on June 22 (Butler’s birthday) in collaboration with Arlington Garden. The event featured seven stations, including cyanotype, plant medicine, readings, typewriter workshops, somatics, and nap zones.
Created on-site on the day of the event, the print was installed at the entrance of the event as a form of way-finding and portal-making, transporting attendees into a space of radical rest and afro-futurist imagination amid the native and water-wise lushness of the garden.
Project in Progress
Future portraits are planned for ecosystems across California (including the high deserts, oak woodland, coniferous forests, urban parks, grasslands, cultural land, and wetlands) and internationally (Gobi Desert, Atacama Desert).
This work requires funding to continue. Garbutt is actively apply for residencies and grants while seeking patrons. If you would like to sponsor a portrait or nominate a place or person (landworkers, conservationists, indigenous folks, & biologists welcome) to be in one of the large scale prints, please contact us through the form linked below.
“Between Two Worlds (eco-spiritual no. 3)” 2025. Digital Photography. Schessa Garbutt