How To Catch Water Where It Falls

Public events, workshops, and e-workbook

Sheffield and online

Arts Catalyst and online, 2024

A community-driven learning project for creating ‘greener’, fairer and more regenerative art practices of all kinds. Through workshops and publishing it works with regional art workers—in their own communities—to develop and test equitable decision-making tools, skill-building and cultivate placemaking. 

Background 

Catching water where it falls is one of the ways great civilisations began. Whether in lands of plenty or drought, holding and moving water recharged something in a landscape, and each other, so new worlds could flourish. From dew collected from a Hawthorn before the May day dawn or qanat tunnels ferrying water from under a distant mother hill, our ancestors knew that to grow a garden they had to nurture the water resources to sustain it.

Today, living and working in seriously sustainable and environmentally nourishing ways can feel like trying to grow a garden in a desert. Radical green actions and social transformations are needed, but are challenging to bring to life. The provisioning systems that hold and support us in Modern environments flow in different directions to truly green and just ways of living. Even rain without soil cannot soak the ground. To catch water where it falls first we must learn how, as water harvester Zephaniah Phiri Maseko (1927–2015) described, to “plant the rain”.

“Planting the rain” is what I use to describe a series of equitable decision-making tools, based on art, natural systems and social justice methods. It is a shorthand to talk about the preparatory groundwork for becoming people-centred, value-based decision-makers.

You start where you are—where you live, work, study, grow, and/or play; in a way that lifts you, as it also lifts others, our larger communities, and the ecosystems we are all nested within; so that our combined health and potential improves and evolves. Together we will find how to endow ourselves and our community with skills of self-reliance, collaboration and cooperation contributing to many living systems that spark and regenerate life for all.

This is an invitation to join us in “planting the rain”.