Meet Confluence!

Based at Ushaw, we are an interdisciplinary arts collective quietly bubbling with joy to play together. We come from three different angles – visual arts, performing arts and storytelling – and we now have Room 106 as a dedicated place to share, groove, swirl, snag and release together We want to develop a community hub for people interested in play, art, ecology and belonging in Co. Durham.

I met Seymour and Fiery last autumn while facilitating Play Us A River – Deerness Devotions. Fiery spotted a poster for Play us a river while out walking her dog and feeling low and isolated after finishing her Masters in Visual Art she knew she had to get involved. After a few weeks of knowing each other, she invited me to meet Burden in the woods, a fragmented sculpture, and when Burden unexpectedly threw me fully in the river, Fiery and I knew we had more to do together.

Seymour I had met a few times and we had both picked up a good scent from each other. Play Us A River gave us a chance to suss each other out more in a predominantly non verbal space.

The decision to get a shared studio came so easy and with minimal angst . And here we now are – studio holders at Ushaw, a former Catholic seminary.

Our first month of exploratory sessions together we have stated close to River’s ways – trusting that the shared space can hold many different currents, that sometimes we will converge and other times diverge and that listening is the best place to start.

The acoustics of this stone room high ceilings hold so much silence and space. Sound comes back clearer than it was made. Fog accumulates on the window and the ceiling beckons . The holes in the carpets are vortexs to other ways of grooving with hoovers. We open the door to for our neighbourly banjo player to flood our plains.