We have talked about Revolution in terms of its meaning in the political sense and many of the revolutions that have occurred in modern history; the American, French, and Spanish.  Elfrede has discussed the physical and mechanical type of revolution, being rotation.

I wanted to explore a different type of revolution.  It is the revolution that occurs when we step outside the normal, everyday and mundane.  When we think laterally, or upside down, inside out or completely radically about something.  When we question the current standard of behaviour, or methodology or execution of something, we set ourselves apart from the crowd.

This is the province of the thinkers, the academics, the philosophers and the creatives.  Paul Gauguin, the French post-Impressionist artist said, “Art is either plagiarism or revolution” which is a bit black and white in its approach to the issue but essentially says that we either copy something already done, or come up with a completely original way of doing something on our own.  In reality most work, by most artists, sits somewhere in the vague grey middle.  We are influenced by what others have done, we take small parts of other’s concepts and methods, integrate it into our own work, and become more practiced in technique, but few of us will ever be at the core of starting a revolution, such as cubism, or neo-expressionism.

By the way, this is a quilt I made in response to the Invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2022. I started it when I saw the Russian tanks on the snowfields in the news reports and the women of Ukraine enlisting in their armed forces.

When I was involved in business, I often went to seminars where futurists talked about possibilities that were approaching, what was likely to be successful and what might be a mere passing fad.  I especially enjoyed where they discussed the “disrupters”, those who took on the establishment in a particular industry and completely disrupted it by their different approach to the business.  Ride-sharing companies are a good example, where technology completely disrupted the taxi industry in my country, destroying the capital value of the licensing system by replacing the licensed taxi with a random person who had a car, a mobile phone and time available to drive you across town.  This is the business form of a revolution.

So, do we have any revolutionaries in fibre art?  Who are our disruptors, pushing boundaries, changing the world?  They are out there, sometimes accidental heroes, sometimes deliberate anarchists who probe to see what they can provoke.  Maybe only history will reveal who they are.

Please note that in this quick discussion, I did not want to cross any boundaries by including famous artist works that I may not have had the rights to reproduce.  Please search the artist names for images of work by Jackson Pollock, Georgia O’Keefe, Rosalie Gascoigne and Jean-Michel Basquiat.  They are my revolutionaries.