By Rachel Fleming, Hanien Conradie & Colin Campbell

In traditional African cosmologies, The Rainmaker is the one who works with hidden forces and flows of nature to restore balance and harmony into the world.

Through making beauty, through repair of damage on the earth, through subtle attunement, deep listening, careful allurement and humble propitiation, the important work of co-creating, healing and making new is done.

In the old days, the Rainmaker would send people onto the land to create beauty, to paint tree stumps with ochre, to replant where the earth was exposed, to make offerings at the rivers and springs in gratitude for the rain. By making art in this way, even in damaged places, the earth would become so beautiful that the clouds could not help but be charmed and release their waters from the sky, balance would return and the land would be restored and healed.

In this time of transformation and potential, a time when we need to repair damage, make beauty and allure the powers that bring the restoring rain, we brought together a group of land-artists in the English Lake District this summer to summon the Rainmaker within.

The idea of humans having a role in the keeping of beauty and balance within the natural world has been all but lost in contemporary culture, but our intention was to see how this indigenous practice from another time and another place could be retrieved through ritual practice and art-making.

For one week, we worked on the shore and hills of Loweswater, in ceremony and pilgrimage, creating ephemeral art installations and making such beauty with our words, prayers and art-making to allure the rain to fall. On the last day, after an unusually dry spell in a usually wet place, it fell. We realised the potency of ephemeral art – art that is made purely out of nature’s materials, as a response and an offering to place, for the eyes and ears of the more than human who live there – as a way of conversing with the land, and bringing up hidden and healing aspects of our own psyche in response to that conversation.

Nature responded to our call in a myriad of ways. Even those familiar with working closely with the land were surprised by the sudden rising of wind, by unexpected birdsong or a shaft of light from an otherwise grey sky, when a making of art was offered as a gift. It is hard to imagine how we as humans can have forgotten this immediate response of the natural world to our propitiations and offerings, and that an immense healing and transformative potential is still there should we choose to work intentionally and humbly with it, in reciprocity for the land and for ourselves.

All who came there felt deeply transformed by that week, all felt the ancient pull and power of the Rainmaker’s art, regardless of our places and times. We found that it is still possible to be called into deep and healing conversation, through the images we can create with our words and art, and the images that flow around us as the primary text of nature, we felt that balance can be restored.

This is an ongoing work and will continue with our 2025 Animate Arts Programme.

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