Artworks Are Hidden Until it Rains in Seattle–Now it’s Sold Around the World | Impact That Lasts

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Quick summary: This story highlights recent developments related to creativity, showing how constructive action can lead to meaningful results.

Ask anyone who lives in a rainy city and they’ll tell you that you just have to make the best of it.

In Seattle, one artist did exactly that by making an eco-friendly spray material that can only be seen when it’s wet. It’s become so popular that the city government is using it to decorate bus stops.

Called Rainworks (rather than artworks) the product is sold in tandem with stencils and is based on superhydrophobic coatings. Perceptive readers may note that these coatings represent a source of the dreaded “forever chemicals,” but can also rest assured that the founder of Rainworks, Peregrine Church, recognized that too.

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Partnering with some folks in Belgium who were seeking, like Church, to make nature-based hydrophobic coatings, he and his friends began with late-night guerilla artworks that would appear the following days in the rain as hidden messages or images appearing on sidewalks out of nothing.

Rainwork’s first social media highlight—of a bucket of water tossed on a sidewalk to reveal a hidden hopscotch course, went crazily viral and spawned instant demand for the product that was then just a prototype.

Church used the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter to fund the creation of a business to manufacture and market Rainworks products, and it’s been going strong ever since.

“Seattle has such a deep connection with rain. It’s integral to the culture and the personality of the city,” Church told the Seattle Times. “There’s also a lot of really kind, caring, passionate people here. And so I like to think about rainworks representing both of those things. Yes, it’s a rainy city. Yes, we have dreary days. But we’re also making the best of it.”

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Seattle Department of Transportation recently commissioned Rainworks to make series of designs on their new Beacon Hill plaza bustop, a pedestrian area where the DoT surveyed commuters to figure out what they’d like to see more of.

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The answers were places to spend time with friends, more shelter from the rain and the sun, and art.

Rainworks came and, with likely no one understanding what they were doing given that the coating that makes the artworks is invisible when dry, sprayed a couple of sea lions, an orca, a giant wave, and a 25-foot maze around the plaza and the bus shelter.

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Only when the inevitable Seattle nimbus clouds gathered above Beacon Hill, and the fat raindrops started falling, did commuters get a chance to see what was beneath their feet.

The Rainworks community is now worldwide, and given that the pieces are invisible in the dry, the website has a map of dozens of rainworks, from Nigeria to Scotland, and from Seattle to New South Wales.

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