Studio Note 08 – September 2026
A note on what reaches us, what we choose to carry and what happens to it before it
passes on.
I’ve been thinking about inheritance. The thought arrived by a slightly unexpected route.
While returning to Guardian of the Future and writing From Leadership to Stewardship, I kept coming back to the idea that we hold things for a time.
In that essay, the question travelled outwards into leadership, institutions, technology and the systems we build together.
But afterwards, it kept tugging at me and I knew it wasn’t quite finished.
If stewardship is partly about what happens while something is in our care, what is it that we inherit in the first place? And how much of it do we even recognise as
inheritance?
What follows is riddled with questions, and I make no apology for that. Studio Notes is an exploration we undertake together. I don’t ask questions because I already have the answers. I ask them because questioning is how I find my way into an idea – and perhaps how you find your own way through it. We each make our own meaning, and I think the real opportunity lies in the space between the question on the page and the answer that begins to form in you.
I hope these questions give you room to consider what inheritance means in your own life.
What do we mean when we talk about inheritance?
When I hear the word inheritance, I tend to think first about the things left behind after
somebody dies.
A house, maybe. Jewellery. Money. Books. Photographs. Objects that once belonged to another person and now belong to us. But is that really all inheritance is?
I began pondering on recipes that are handed down from generation to generation. Part of my own grandmother’s legacy was a recipe for Maids of Honour small cakes. She didn’t actually write it down – it passed from one mind to another, but it was
inherited all the same. But what had I actually inherited? There was no piece of paper. Was it the recipe itself? The memory of my grandmother? Or the feeling of being in her kitchen when the world felt magical?
The more I think about this, the less certain I am that the object and the inheritance are necessarily the same thing.
A ring can carry a relationship. An old tool can carry knowledge of the hands that used it. A book can contain evidence of the person who read it before us.
Those connections may be easier to recognise because they have an object for the meaning to gather around. But what about the space between the inherited object and us? Perhaps the meaning resides neither in the object nor in our memory alone, but in the relationship between what it carries and what we bring to it.
As I explored in What Makes Something Feel Personal?, objects can gather meaning through everything that happens around them.
Perhaps, by the time they reach us, we are inheriting far more than the thing itself – maybe we are inheriting the story it has learned to carry.
Can we inherit something we cannot see?
This is where the question begins to widen for me.
What about the things that reach us without any formal moment of being handed over? Like my grandmother’s Maids of Honour.
Could we inherit a phrase because somebody used it so often that it became part of our own language?
Can we inherit a way of welcoming people, an attitude towards work or an instinct to take care of everyone else before ourselves?
And what about the more difficult things?
Can silence be inherited? Fear? The sense that certain subjects must never be discussed? A belief about what somebody like us should – or should not – expect from life?
None of these things arrives with a label attached.
We may not experience them as something we have received at all. We may simply assume they are part of who we are.
But how much of what we call personality is really inheritance that has become so familiar we can no longer see its beginning?
And if we do eventually recognise where something came from, does that change our
relationship with it?
Can we inherit from people we never knew?
Every sentence I write depends upon a language I did not create.
Every material I use in my art carries a history that began long before it reached my hands.
The same must be true of almost everything we make.
Artists inherit techniques, symbols and ways of seeing. Writers inherit stories and structures. Makers use knowledge developed by people whose names may have disappeared entirely.
Even when we deliberately reject a tradition, it remains part of the conversation because it gives us something to resist.
Does that mean originality is less original than we like to imagine?
I’m not sure it does.
I’m beginning to think originality emerges in the encounter between what we have received and the particular person we have become. Two people can inherit the same story, skill or creative tradition, but it cannot pass through them in exactly the same way.
So, maybe the question is not whether something came entirely from us. Maybe it is what happened when it passed through us.
And maybe that’s why an artist’s story can be so compelling. We are not only encountering what they made. We are encountering something of what passed through them to make it possible.
Can we inherit from ourselves?
This may be the form of inheritance I find most intriguing at this point in my life when I have the space to look backwards across time. And as I do that, I’ve begun to
consider what I have received from the person I used to be.
An old sketchbook can sometimes feel as though it was left behind by a version of ourselves we once knew intimately but can no longer entirely inhabit. The marks are ours. The choices are ours. And yet we may no longer remember making them – or understand what we were reaching towards at the time.
But, when we look at an old sketchbook during a different period of our lives, it can also offer us material, ideas and a way forward that we had not seen – or even valued – at the time.
In Why Do Old Drawings Sometimes Become New Ideas?, I wondered whether creative work can sometimes know something before we do.
Looking at that question now, I wonder whether returning to old work is also an act of
inheritance.
An earlier version of us noticed something, followed an instinct or took a risk. Years later, we encounter the evidence without necessarily sharing the same fears, knowledge or understanding and that opens up something completely new which wasn’t available to person the we were when we created it.
So, what do we owe that earlier self? Do we preserve what they made? Reinterpret it? Allow it to begin another piece of work?
Or can we simply acknowledge what it gave us and leave it where it is?
Perhaps a creative practice is partly a conversation between all the people we have been. Each version leaves something behind. The next decides what might happen to it.
Should everything we inherit be preserved?
I think this is where inheritance becomes potentially uncomfortable.
Some things come to us carrying love, knowledge or meaning. Others carry assumptions, injuries and ways of behaving that may have caused harm long before we were here.
Does the fact that something survived make it valuable?
Do we preserve certain traditions because they still matter – or because they are familiar?
And when we reject something from the past, is it always because we have understood what is wrong with it? Or might we sometimes discard things before recognising what they still have to teach us?
I don’t think care can mean preserving everything simply because we inherited it. Whether from ourselves or from others. But neither can progress mean removing everything that came before us.
So how do we recognise the difference?
When does care ask us to protect something?
When does it ask us to repair it?
Could changing an inheritance be a way of respecting it?
And could refusing to pass something on sometimes be an act of stewardship too?
Does preservation mean keeping something unchanged?
I keep finding myself caught by this question.
If a family recipe changes slightly with each person who makes it, has the original inheritance been lost – or has that willingness to adapt allowed it to remain part of
people’s lives?
If a story is retold in the language of another generation, is it still the same story?
If an artwork is photographed, digitised or reinterpreted, does something continue – or does something disappear?
In Why Do Originals Matter?, I thought about the difference between an original work and everything that grows from it.
The original remains where the history began. Nothing that comes afterwards can go back and occupy that same place. But does preserving the beginning require everything else to remain still?
Perhaps some things survive because they are protected from change, whilst others survive because they are allowed to respond to it.
How do we know which kind of care something needs?
And is it possible to change the form while preserving the relationship, knowledge or meaning held within it?
What are we already passing on?
Up until this point, I have been thinking mostly about what reaches us from the past.
But inheritance doesn’t only happen after somebody is gone, does it?
What are people receiving from us now, perhaps without either of us realising it?
What do they learn is safe to say in our presence?
What do they begin to believe is possible because of the way we respond to them?
What might a child absorb from the way adults speak about themselves, other people or the world?
And what does an artist pass on?
Only the finished work? Or also a way of noticing, a question that remains open, or permission for somebody else to see something differently?
Perhaps we are already becoming part of other people’s inheritance through ordinary encounters whose significance we may never witness.
That thought feels both lovely to me and slightly daunting.
Because it means we are passing things on all the time.
What will the future inherit from us?
When I look at Guardian of the Future now, I find myself wondering whether the figure is
standing at the point where inheritance becomes choice.
Not protecting everything merely because it already exists. Not clearing everything away in the belief that the future must always begin again.
Perhaps the Guardian is paying attention. Trying to recognise what matters before deciding what should happen next. And perhaps that is where the connection with stewardship sits for me.
Inheritance may describe what reaches us.
Stewardship may begin when we ask what should happen to it while it is here.
Will we leave it stronger? More open? More capable of
continuing without us? Or might somebody else eventually have to repair what happened while it was in our hands?
A continuing conversation…
As I think back through the earlier Studio Notes, I can’t help wondering if we had already been circling inheritance when we asked what makes an object personal? When old drawings return carrying ideas their creator had not yet recognised? When images gather meaning as they move through culture? When originals remain at the beginning whilst later versions develop histories of their own?
Perhaps all of them are asking what happens when something travels from one person, place or moment into another.
I’m beginning to wonder whether we ever inherit a completed story. Maybe we simply enter it somewhere in the middle and carry it for a while. We alter it, even if only through our decision to preserve it. And eventually, somebody else may enter the story after us and the story changes again.
Every Studio Note begins with a question, rather than an answer. This one had many, and I hope it helped you find your own answers.
As always, we will continue following the questions this Note has opened across social media – as the conversation moves through meaning, authorship, interpretation and the unexpected places creative work can take us.
But for now, another question to leave you with…
What have you inherited – and what do you want to happen to it while it is in your hands?
