About All Beings Conflence

All Beings Confluence is a community-based, interactive project that was directly inspired by Carolyn McDade, a composer, social activist and environmentalist whose music has sustained and nourished many over the decades.

All Beings Confluence is an ever-expanding installation crated by many individuals. It consists of a series of long, narrow sheer panels, each representing a single living Being — perhaps a ladybug, a bird, a tree, or a single blue-green algae who first provided our planet with oxygen. The completed panels are installed to fill a whole area and a single panel is never seen by itself. It is always “in community” with all the other Beings. Everyone is invited to walk amongst them – they move gently with the currents, always merging into different patterns & combinations of colour & light. For a brief moment we can actually feel ourselves as part of a vast, complex & interconnected whole.

All Beings Confluence began in 2010 when four Canadian prairie women, Madeleine LePage, Martha Cole and Shannon Carson from Saskatchewan and Fenella Temmerman from Manitoba, were learning the music for Carolyn’s latest CD, “Widening Embrace”. By August, 2011, when the CD was being recorded, 75 Beings were installed at the Banff Centre of the Arts to offer support and inspiration to the singers who had gathered from across North America. Since then, All Beings Confluence has been seen in over 35 venues across Canada and the United States, including the Sisters of Earth Conference in Indiana, “Bioneers” in Detroit, Michigan and the Western Women’s Conference at the Naramata Retreat Centre in Kelowna, BC. Over 4,600 people have moved through these Beings and the number of panels has increased to over 250 with more venues booked into the future and more panels being added all the time.

May we each find our place in this complex web of life which sustains us all.

Martha Cole

Companion to the Beings

Would like to have an installation of these panels for an event or an exhibition in your community? Would you like to make a panel or have a workshop offered in your community?

If so, contact: Martha Cole – mcole@sasktel.net