The Inheritance Beneath Your Creative Work
What if the most powerful meanings in your work are the ones you didn’t consciously place there?
Symbolism in an artist’s work is essential, yet many artists don’t approach it intentionally. Meaning often emerges from the subconscious—a transmission that can be felt long before it can be articulated. As someone who analyzes art and narrative architecture, I am trained to notice how symbolism operates through color, shape, and objects charged with historical, spiritual, and cultural weight. Symbolism speaks whether or not we plan for it.
I experienced this recently at ARTE NOIR, where Tasanee Durrett exhibited her work Tides of Liberation. She incorporated raffia strands directly onto the canvas—a material historically used by enslaved people for rope, baskets, ceremonial garments, and ritual masks. The moment I saw it, I felt history move through the surface of the painting. I did not interview the artist, so I cannot speak to her intention. But intention is only one component of meaning. Viewers participate in constructing narrative, and my own knowledge recognized the gravity of that material before my conscious mind supplied language.
When I later researched raffia’s history, it unlocked deeper layers of significance, drawing forward fragments of everything I have absorbed over years of reading about culture, memory, and survival. This is where narrative becomes powerful: not only in what the artist embeds, but in what becomes activated in the encounter between artwork and witness.
This activation is a form of inheritance. Whether we understand it biologically, culturally, or psychologically, we carry vast archives within us. They shape our instincts, our attractions, our refusals, our sense of recognition. We may call it intuition, but intuition is often knowledge moving faster than explanation.
I am not suggesting that artists must aggressively uncover every symbolic thread when discussing the narrative of their work. But I am suggesting that you give yourself permission to trust the material rising to the surface. Your inclinations are rarely random. They are tethered to histories, traditions, and narrative structures that exceed individual awareness.
Perhaps a work begins in pure feeling. Yet as it moves into the world, you can ask: Why this gesture? Why this texture? Why this form and not another? What lineage might be speaking through me?
The answers may not arrive immediately. They may remain partial. But the inquiry itself deepens the narrative you tell about the work and expands its communicative force.
Power lives in that exchange—between what we can name and what we carry without language, between the archive inside the body and the object placed before us.