LISA BEHAN
“Compassion is hard-wired. It’s an evolutionary development that began with the parent-child relationship and, as societies have grown, has been extended to allow us to form supportive and caring relationships with our friends, neighbours, colleagues, and communities. In fact, the human species could never have survived and thrived without compassion – allowing us to create systems like healthcare and public services that bring support to millions.””​
​
A timely work - Confluence of Compassion is an evolving participatory, contemplative artwork. Its conception started with the prompt: Imagine living a world flooded with compassion.
Confluence used in this instance is an act or process of merging. Compassion is a worldview.
At its core, compassion is about recognising our common humanity – about seeing that we are all human with our own struggles, hopes, and needs. Knowing that, we bring a desire to care for, support, and value other people just as we would like to be cared for, valued, and supported. Not only that, it means creating whole societies in a way that everyone feels included and their needs met, defining our approach to everything from climate policy to economics.
At the dam
What if we wrote our compassion needs down, set them out to float trusting they would be received? Perhaps the clarity of the articulation would focus our minds, distilling our needs to their most elementary state.
Might it be that water from this dam and the immersed offerings of compassion find their way to other bodies of water, “that the cyclical life of rainfall - sky to earth to sky again, over and over” - could bring compassion “through cloudburst and current,” to all waters “that flowed across the earth?”
As people engage with the artwork, adding their own experiences of receiving or giving compassion, they can visually see the ripple effect of compassionate acts and the larger subtle flow on effect this has on a societal level. The natural substance to demonstrate ripples and flow is water which is why this artwork is part of the Aqua Limina exhibition. Contemplating water as a metaphor for compassion connects us to our relationship with nature allowing us to remember that the reason humans exist at all is because of water.