Field excursions, painting workshops and recording sessions from Where Does the Rain Go? Photography: Juli Talerico. Courtesy SFU Galleries.
Where Does the Rain Go?
Led by Pietro Sammarco
with Helena Krobath, Liz Toohey-Wiese
and the grade 4/5 students of University Highlands Elementary
APR 24 – JUN 19 2025
Burnaby Mountain
Where Does the Rain Go? is a collaborative art project undertaken by the students in grades four and five at University Highlands Elementary School. Led by sound artist and arts educator Pietro Sammarco, participants explored the path that rainwater makes from the peak of Burnaby Mountain down across its face, through storm drains and flood ponds and into the numerous creeks that ultimately flow into the ocean
Over eight weeks of exploratory field outings and creative workshops, and with the help of guest artists Liz Toohey-Wiese and Helena Krobath as well as their own teachers Cara Taylor and Christine Yee, students worked in small groups with the rain and creek water to create paintings and sonic compositions.
Installed first in the Library of University Highlands Elementary so that students could share their learning with the rest of their school community, Where Does the Rain Go? will be presented before the public along with many other artists’ works as part of the first exhibition of the new Marianne and Edward Gibson Art Museum, which opens on SFU’s Burnaby Mountain campus in Fall 2025.
Made possible with the generous support of the Tuey Charitable Foundation
Organized by the Marianne and Edward Gibson Art Museum in partnership with University Highlands Elementary, SFU Faculty of Education and SFU School for Communication
Video documentation by Qiuli Wu
Photo documentation by Juli Talerico
Special thanks to UHE Education Assistant Robyn Hurst; SFU Faculty of Education volunteers Lelia Chang and Shelly Li; Lindsay Holliday, Principal, University Highlands Elementary; Milena Droumeva, Director and Glenfraser Endowed Professor in Sound Studies, SFU School of Communication; Ching-chu Lin, Assistant Professor, Arts Education, SFU Faculty of Education; Lynn Fels, Professor, SFU Faculty of Education; and Marianne and Edward Gibson Art Museum staff members Mackenzy Albright, Susanna Browne, Russell Gordon and Sydney Laiss
Artist Bios
Pietro Sammarco’s creative practice improvises with found sounds to learn about our relationships to place. Recently, he made compositions by recording Nanaimo’s Millstone River over the course of a year, and listening in on elementary students as they designed a chocolate bar in East Vancouver. He is currently editing an academic podcast that critically examines Okanagan Tourism by listening to environmental sound; and is sound designing a multichannel video installation about a ghost town in Kitsault, BC. He has taught listening and audio production at Emily Carr University, UBC, SFU, the Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre, the Vancouver Public Library’s Inspiration Lab. From 2016 to 2021, he programmed educational activities at VIVO Media Arts Centre, to deepen community engagement with the non-profit’s exhibitions, archives, and facilities. Pietro earned his MA from SFU on the unceded territories of the the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and Sel̓íl̓witulh, studying soundscape composition with Barry Truax and Hildegard Westerkamp, and youth media with Stuart Poyntz.
Helena Krobath (s/he/they) was born in Matsqui after their family immigrated from various parts of Eastern Europe to Manitoba and British Columbia in the 1930s and 1950s. Krobath now lives in unceded territories known as Vancouver, where she works with sound and visual arts, transforming field recordings and homemade instruments with digital software and experimenting with place-based experiences, especially soundwalking and immersive play. Krobath also does sound design for the award-nominated Invisible Institutions Podcast, teaches in the field of Communication, and facilitates community-based arts exploration. They are particularly interested in how narratives are created not only with words but with our senses, movement, and arrangement of space.
Liz Toohey-Wiese is a settler artist residing on the homelands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh and sə̓lílwətaʔɬ peoples. She is a graduate from the MFA program at NSCAD University. She completed her undergraduate degree in painting at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, also undertaking coursework at the University of Victoria and the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Lyon. She has taken part in solo and group shows across Canada, and has undertaken artist residencies at the Sointula Art Shed (2019), the Caetani Cultural Center (2020/21/22), Island Mountain Arts (2021), the Similkameen Artist Residency (2023), Artscape Gibraltar Point (2023), and the Klondike Institute for Arts + Culture (2024). Deeply interested in the history of landscape painting, her paintings explore contemporary relationships between identity and place. Her most recent work explores the complicated topic of wildfires and their connections to tourism, economy, grief, and renewal.