Tag: symbolism in art

Sara Jacob paints from the collision of cultures, memory, and lineage. Moving between Berkshire, Nigeria, and the North of England, she never tried to simplify who she was. Instead, she built her practice inside the friction. Using indigo-dyed cloth, ancestral symbolism, and even her grandmother’s original oil paints, her work holds history as material, not metaphor. In her paintings, migration is not just movement across land it’s what continues to travel through the body, across generations, refusing to settle into one story.

Every artist has little things that mean a lot, maybe it’s a childhood toy, a pattern you loved in your grandmother’s kitchen, or a recurring motif you notice in dreams. These small, personal symbols carry stories that only you fully understand, and they can become powerful tools in your art. When someone else sees them, even if they don’t grasp every layer, they feel a connection, like a secret handshake. Think about a painting that features a little paper boat. To you, it might be a memory of a rainy afternoon,…