The dystopian world created by influential science fiction author Octavia E. Butler (1947−2006) in her prescient Parables novels opens in 2024 in an America devastated by climate change and corporate greed, where a Christian-fundamentalist brand of fascism is taking hold. ‘Earthseed’ is both how the central character, Olamina, refers to all human beings, and the name that she gives the movement she founds amidst the ruins of civilisation. Earthseed is a matriarchal cult, a philosophy and a manual for survival: ‘God is Change’, Olamina pronounces, and it is only through malleability and adaptability that we can take control of that inexorable change and resist chaos and victimhood. Humans – Earthseed − contain the potential to escape our self-engineered destruction and instead ‘take root among the stars’. The works in this exhibition resonate with the notion of travel to outer space and inner space, in different ways considering the female body as a site of transformation as well as a portal for the imagination.

Looking to the distant past as well as the future, Marguerite Humeau locates the roots of our spiritual sensibility entangled with the origins of human consciousness and speculates on our scope for evolution. Julie Curtiss' disquieting surrealist representation of femininity hints at secret rituals while suggesting a post-human hybridity and adaptation. Loie Hollowell’s work, taking shape from the female body, celebrates the miracle that is human reproduction, in a language of forms that reference earth, seed and cosmos.