Jocelyn Catterson is an artist, educator, and musician based in Del Norte, Colorado in the San Luis Valley. She works at the intersection of art and science, combining data with design to tell stories of water, land use, and climate change.
Anya Petrone Slepyan and I visited Catterson at her office in Del Norte to talk about her interdisciplinary pursuits in her rural community. We were on a reporting trip in the San Luis Valley to attend Crane Festival, a yearly event in nearby Monte Vista that brings thousands of visitors to the area to see the migrating sandhill cranes. While this conversation does not include cranes, they fit into the wider scope of living in the valley, in a community that prioritizes wetlands, wildlife, and water. Living at the headwaters of the Rio Grande, one of the most important rivers in the Southwest, and in a very agricultural community, water is always front-of-mind and Catterson and I talked a lot about it.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Daily Yonder: Can you introduce yourself and tell me a little bit about all of your multifaceted pursuits?
Jocelyn Catterson: My name is Jocelyn Catterson. I am the community engagement director for the Rio Grande Headwaters Land Trust. I am also an artist, an educator, and a musician. I wear a lot of hats in this rural community. A lot of my art focuses on place-based topics, trying to translate some of the really complex science tied to water here in the San Luis Valley to more digestible visuals for people to help them understand. I ended up in the water world here in the San Luis Valley because I became one of the Colorado Art Science Environment fellows and started doing my art project for that fellowship tied to groundwater in the San Luis Valley. Through that, I was interviewing farmers and ranchers and water professionals and really diving deep into the science and the lived experience of water here. I ended up working in the water world – the art is really more of an educational tool than anything. I think a lot of conversations tied to these topics happen in vacuums, or behind closed doors that people don’t feel like they can open, or [that they] might not have a seat at the table. I think art makes things more accessible for people, and a lot of that is what I do here [at the land trust], too. As the community engagement director, my job is literally to go out in the community, listen to people, get to know things that are happening, and when I see a need or a gap that might be filled by something that we can do as an organization, that’s what we do. We do a lot of water education, and have a pretty big art-related education project through the land trust as well. So again, multiple hats.
DY: Your work really does combine art and science in a very interdisciplinary way. Why is art an important tool to make sense of the world around us and explain these really complex topics? I saw your groundwater installation, and that was a really beautiful representation of how to understand water through art. Why is art important to communication?
JC: Well, art transcends language. I think that often science can get really caught up in jargon, words, acronyms, phrases or even concepts that are really hard to understand if you don’t have that background. So many of these scientific topics are very relevant to our local community, our everyday lives, and sometimes we have to see it in order to feel that the data is actually connected to us. I’ve done a handful of projects where I’ve gotten farmers and ranchers teary eyed, which is, I feel, a big deal. They can look at it and it hits a certain chord that’s different than me standing up in front of an audience and talking about drought in the San Luis Valley. It’s more about the emotional aspect of these topics. The groundwater [installation] is a great example. Most people, when they hear aquifer or groundwater, think of a giant underground lake. That is not at all what that is. So I use art to help people understand the concept, even if I’m not maybe drawing or painting something that is “scientifically accurate.” The point is getting that person to understand the topic more than anything. And again, I think it makes science more exciting and accessible.
“Community Water Web” was installed in a coffee shop in Alamosa and allowed community members to participate in visualizing groundwater in the San Luis Valley. (Photo courtesy of Jocelyn Catterson)
DY: Can you talk about what it means to you to be invested in and a part of this rural community, and how does your connection to place affect your work?
JC: The San Luis Valley is an insanely special place that has been tugging at my heart strings my entire life. I have core childhood memories here. Honestly, I did not grow up here, but I’ve been coming here my whole life, and I ended up here by accident. Even though I loved it, I never thought that this would be a place that would be perfect for me. I have always really loved rural communities. I grew up in a rural community. I’ve spent most of my life in rural communities, but the moment that I moved here, I just felt so held by the valley and this community, and it was just a gut feeling that this is exactly where I’m supposed to be. People in the valley talk a lot about the frog spirit, farmers, ranchers, everybody talks about this story of the frogs that used to live here, some people say it’s a turtle. Lots of variations of this story, but basically the concept being that if you are supposed to be here, the frog spirit sort of attaches itself to your back and keeps pulling you back here, even if you try to leave, because you are supposed to be in this place and do something important here. I think that I have felt that. This rural community saw me for exactly who I was, exactly my strengths and my skills, and said, “We want you here, we need those things.” I love interacting with people that are so different from me. I love my neighbors who are so different from one another, but still show up for each other. I think because of the water pressures that the San Luis Valley has been dealing with since the drought in the early 2000s, even in the water community, we collaborate in the Rio Grande basin in a way that other basins within the state of Colorado do not. We’re able to have really hard conversations together, because the community is so strong that we would rather figure things out together as a community, even when we disagree, than have somebody else from the outside come and tell us what we need to do. I think that’s so special. Seeing all the people around me work so hard to make this place better makes me want to make sure that I am contributing something meaningful too. I love it here so much.
DY: It really feels like such a special place. And all that collaboration is so important. I live in Montezuma County [Colorado] so I always get a very similar feeling here [in the San Luis Valley] as I do there [in Montezuma County].
JC: It is a very unique landscape. And it’s a landscape of extremes too. Center, Colorado gets the least amount of precipitation on average in the entire state, right next to Wolf Creek Pass, which often gets the most precipitation in the entire state. So you go from the desert to an intense snow pack. The sand dunes are incredible. The geology down here, the wetlands, but the diversity of communities too, San Luis versus Del Norte versus Saguache, it’s like all the different cultures and history in this place are also incredible.
DY: Yeah, and just being surrounded by some of the tallest mountains in the country. Isn’t it one of the highest elevation agricultural valleys?
JC: Yes, agricultural valleys. I can never remember this exact fact, and I should remember it, but it is one of the highest elevation valleys in the world, other than, I want to say, the Tibetan Plateau. [The San Luis Valley is the largest alpine valley in the world]. The San Luis Valley is bigger than the state of New Jersey, and all very high in elevation.
A piece from Catterson’s series “Making the Invisible Visible: Groundwater in the San Luis Valley” which showed as part of a traveling series around Colorado. (Photo courtesy of Jocelyn Catterson)
DY: It is truly special. A fascinating geographical place. So what are some projects that you’re currently working on, or you’re excited about working on right now?
JC: We’re working on a mural project through the land trust. That’s a really fun one, because it’s also being used as an example of a really creative and innovative way to involve the community in water education throughout the state. So we’ll be presenting to other round tables across Colorado, which is really cool.
The other one that we’re doing that I love is Sip and Science. We have started doing a series of science education events for the general public here at the Trade and Post. So basically, again, so much of what I do, whether it’s art personally or the programs that I create here at Rio Grande Headwaters Land Trust, is trying to get more people aware of what is happening around them, with the ultimate goal of more civic engagement. So for Sip and Science, we’re doing one talk a month, and I have experts come in to talk about a specific natural resource topic. I have to coach them a little bit beforehand about, you know, okay, this should be basic level talk. We’re not going to use jargon. And they give a presentation for 30-40 minutes. There’s a little panel and then lots of time for Q&A from people. But we’ve been printing out sort of one-pagers, three to five takeaways from this talk, and then on the back, additional resources and ways to get involved. Because I think again, a lot of people maybe don’t even understand say, our wetland system, or the way that snowpack impacts everything that we do in the valley. And without that base understanding, you can’t really understand how it is impacting you and your community. And without that, you’re not going to go to the land use planning meetings, you’re not going to go to council meetings. You’re not going to really understand some of these things that might come up for vote, or things that are happening in the [water] subdistricts. So the education is with that end goal of more civic engagement, but also a greater sense of community, because to be in a room with 60 people that all are interested in listening to a talk on snowpack is pretty fun.
DY: Can you share a bit more about what the land trust does?
JC: So we were founded in 1999 by a group of grassroots people here in the San Luis Valley, really, in response to some of the first water export schemes. In the 80s, there were a lot of people who were trying to come in and essentially pump water out of the San Luis Valley over the mountains to the Front Range, and this group was founded to sort of protect against that. So as a land trust, there are a lot of different tools that you can use to do that, but we work with private landowners who come to us saying, I want my ranch or my farm or my property to stay like this. I don’t want it developed. I don’t want somebody to be able to come in and buy my water and send it somewhere else. And so basically, we put conservation easements on private properties with landowners around here that tie water to the land forever, that prevent against subdivision. Essentially, we are in charge of protecting the conservation values of that property over time. So it’s a long term relationship with that landowner. But if that landowner passes away or sells the property, the easement goes to the next landowner as well. It stays with the land. And so we are sort of the long-term, forever stewards of these landscapes. With the goal of protecting this headwaters area and the focus on water, we created the Rio Grande initiative. A lot of our first properties were really focused on protecting property and water, specifically along the Rio, which is pretty cool. But our mission is really broad: conserving the land, water and way of life of the San Luis Valley. As the community engagement coordinator, I do a lot of water education. We’ve been working on some forest health projects. We’ve been working on sort of ag mental health issues as well, because that is a big issue in all ag communities, but right here, right now, with a lot of the water issues going on, if we’re truly going to focus on our mission, part of that means supporting our farmers and their mental health as well.
DY: Are there any other things you’re working on that you want to share? And where can people find out more about your work?
JC: One of my recent projects that I just finished was with the Conservation Lands Foundation. I worked on a project with them to do a bunch of interviews and site visits and things down in the southern part of the San Luis Valley surrounding the BLM land. I made a series of paintings for them based on all of those interviews to create value-based paintings, with value words like ‘stewardship’ or ‘solitude’ or things like that. So really analyzing the interviews to try and tease out commonalities that crossed stakeholder boundaries. There are typical stakeholders tied to public lands, and often they’re pitted against each other, and it’s rather divisive, but talking to all of them about more personal stories to try and tease out those commonalities. Ranchers and environmentalists really care about stewardship. And now the Conservation Lands Foundation is using those paintings in a lot of their public lands advocacy work too. Those will be up in a public lands exhibit in Boulder this summer, which is cool, and I’ve been using those to talk about public lands advocacy as well. So art is never really just art for me.
Find out more about Jocelyn on her website or Instagram, and learn more about the Rio Grande Headwaters Land Trust here.
The post Q&A: Jocelyn Catterson on Working at the Intersection of Art and Science appeared first on The Daily Yonder.
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