Roots: Inheritance and Invention

Detail: Bayou (2026), Elizabeth Khoury

We often speak of roots as though they are fixed things.

We imagine them as anchors buried deep beneath the surface, holding us in place, defining where we belong and who we are. Something inherited through family, language, memory, culture, geography. They are the stories told before we were born and the histories that continue to speak through us long after we have forgotten their names.

Roots shape us.

They determine the soil from which we emerge, the nutrients we absorb, the wounds we inherit, and the dreams we are taught to pursue. Even when we leave the places that formed us, they travel with us. They remain embedded in gesture, accent, instinct, and longing. We carry them across borders and oceans. We carry them into rooms where we feel like strangers.

Yet roots are not as static as we imagine.

A tree does not send its roots into the earth once and then stop; roots continue to grow. They seek water. They navigate stone. They adapt to drought and abundance. They alter their direction in response to the world around them.

Human roots are no different. The histories that shape us are not prisons. They are beginnings. We inherit a map, but we do not inherit a destination. Every relationship, every journey, every act of creation extends the root system of the self. We graft new experiences onto old stories. We choose which inheritances to nourish and which to leave behind. We discover communities that feel more like home than the places we came from. We create meaning where none previously existed.

Artists, perhaps more than most, live within this process. Art emerges from the meeting point between what has been given and what can be imagined. Every work carries traces of ancestry—whether cultural, emotional, intellectual, or spiritual—but it also reaches beyond them. Creation becomes a conversation between memory and possibility.

To make art is not simply to express who we are. It is to participate in the continual shaping of that identity. The artist digs into the soil of experience, uncovering fragments, stories, symbols, and wounds. Yet the act of making transforms these materials. A painting, a poem, an installation, or a song does not merely reveal existing roots; it grows new ones. It creates unexpected connections between people, places, and ideas. It allows us to belong to futures that have not yet arrived.

This is why artistic practice often feels at home in liminal spaces. The artist stands between inheritance and invention, between memory and imagination, between what has been lost and what might still be found. In that threshold space, roots cease to be markers of origin alone. They become living structures capable of movement, adaptation, and change.

Perhaps belonging is not found solely in where our roots began.

Perhaps it is found in our ability to cultivate them. To tend them. To redirect them. To allow them to reach toward unfamiliar waters.

We are shaped by our roots, but we are also among their gardeners.

And through the act of creation, we participate in the ongoing work of becoming.

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