Peace and...Revolution?

Don’t you just love Bruegel’s Tower of Babel? Or maybe like me it’s driving you nuts if you’ve spent days, weeks even, drawing it in new etchings and mezzotints. I thought I’d done with it a while back, but no, here it is again. 

It’s significant though as Babel continually represents two things for me. Firstly there is the recognition of what can be achieved through cooperation and collaboration; when we collectively put our differences aside and work towards a common goal.

However, there is also a warning to heed. It comes back again to the two words that I try to let govern my attitudes and responses in life. Compassion and particularly coexistence or cooperation. The history of Babel shows what can also happen if we become self satisfied, arrogant, self righteous, demanding our rights irrespective of the rights of others. Cooperation and coexistence collapses and integration, well, disintegrates!

A bit about the new works…

The new work called “Of Divine and Scientific Truth” (above), the text along the lower part touches on openness, being the opposite of fundamentalism which has a flattened one dimensional view of the world. It states that “…unless one is part of a cult, there is always the opportunity to consider new information at one’s disposal and to change one’s mind.”

“Rare Earth” (above) with its virus/globe image is centred around how conspiracy theories fill the need to believe in the face of anxiety and uncertainty. Intriguingly not all of those who peddle conspiracy theories actually believe them as recent court cases in the UK and USA have demonstrated. There is a business to run and money to be made. In promoting conspiracy theories, the point is to get people used to the idea that everything is a lie, that there is no truth. And once they accept that…biggest liar wins.

But to finish on a hopeful note, “The Ghost of Conflict Past” is the positive one of the bunch here. In the words Peace and Revolution I have flipped letters “evol” mirror image so that it looks like the word “love” (as in Peace and Love). Russell Brand did that on the cover of his book Revolution. Pretty cool.

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