I spent 2014–2015 living in Brazil, where I was conducting research on food insecurity and climate change through a master’s program at the University of Michigan—because nothing says “light reading” quite like drought and industrial agriculture.

Out of that work grew something a bit more tactile (and, thankfully, more cheerful): a plantable coloring book exploring drought as shaped by industrial food systems. Each page is embedded with native wildflowers or herbs—so if all else fails, at least the book can make a graceful exit and become a garden.

The project is, in many ways, a meditation on the tension between the finite and the infinite: our lives, our belongings, the things we hold onto… and the quiet, persistent truth that everything returns to the earth eventually. Matter, after all, is neither created nor destroyed—it simply changes form. Ideally into something that blooms.