There's a room in St. Albert Place that's overgrown with trees and plants, foliage and leaves everywhere. The area has practically turned into a rainforest, what with all of the animals and insects laying about everywhere.
It's a good thing that none of these wild things are real. They're actually just two-dimensional images made by several members of the St. Albert Quilters' Guild along with some friends that tagged along from Edmonton. It's all part of a workshop put on by a Saskatchewan-based fibre artist. Its purpose is to shine a light on the species of the world.
All Beings Confluence is partly the brainchild of Martha Cole, who will be compiling all of these pieces to take to the Banff Centre of the Arts for a show opening up next month.
“Each panel represents a single living being on the planet,” Cole began to explain. “There are a million and a half species …”
“We don't have to do them all,” chimed in Diane Betton, one of the guild's members and a contributor to the project.
It all starts with a group chat where the members discuss which being speaks to each person the most. Then they each get a long panel of sheer fabric between 25 and 30 centimetres wide by between 2.4 and 3.6 metres long. On the panel, they are invited to place a design of any biological entity, whether it be animal, vegetable or somewhere in the middle.
There's a cactus and a crocus, a long winding snake and Icelandic poppies to round out this stitchers' Garden of Eden — even blue-green algae. I've never heard of diatoms before, but there they are on another panel. I later learned that diatoms are unicellular phytoplanktons.
Cole has been travelling around doing various three-day workshops with different quilting groups, mostly in western Canada. First, she coaches the participants on the craft, and then she compiles their efforts as she moves towards southern Alberta.
Her stop in St. Albert during the first half of last week was one of her last chances to collect more panels and more species. The multimedia exhibit installation in Banff will likely have between 80 and 100 pieces. The show will be held in conjunction with the recording of a suite of music composed by Carolyn McDade, an artist concerned with environmental and social justice issues.
The suite will then be sung by women from across the continent as part of a recording called A Widening Embrace. The show and the music will then travel together as a way of inspiring more and more craftspeople to contribute their own panels, growing the project in size and in scope.
They will be installed in such a way that viewers can walk amongst them as a new kind of sensory art. Since the panels are sheer, they will see other multiple beings at the same time, one overlapping many others.
“It's a physical representation of the species as all inter-related on our planet,” Cole explained. “This is to help us to understand that we are a part — a small part — of something much, much bigger.”
“Hopefully this will just grow and grow and grow. I would like to see a million and a half of them actually,” she revealed.
Betton made the analogy between this and the famous AIDS Memorial Quilt of the late 1980s. That started off with a few contributors, but eventually grew so large that it now covers more than 120,000 square metres, and the project still continues today.
“It was a small idea from someone's heart and it just grew. This vision is that this will just spread.”
If you are interested in joining the St. Albert Quilters' Guild, call Hetty Jones at 780-458-9118.
