Open for Interpretation

Whatever the art means to you is what it means.

Like most creatives, I don’t like being told what to do. But worse than telling me what to do is telling me what to think. Don’t even.

I had a well-meaning high school English teacher who would assign us a piece of writing, invite our interpretations, and then – one by one – dismiss them. No. That’s not it, she’d say with a toss of her blonde, crimped hair.

When she finally delivered the “correct” meaning, some consensus handed down by literary scholars, the message was clear: meaning belongs to the experts, not to the rest of us. I remember thinking, “Oh yeah? How do YOU know?” But you don’t question a teacher who wears a silk scarf tied around her neck, you just don’t.

Unless they specifically tell us, can we really know what an artist or a writer was thinking at any given time? Even if we have all the historical facts about them. Even if they willingly tell us, can we be sure they’ve told us everything?

Speaking as an artist and writer myself, when I make something and give it to the world, the only thing I’m allowed to keep is what it meant to me when I created it. Maybe I want to tell you, maybe I don’t. But I’ll be damned if a future high school teacher tells her students what my work does or does not mean. I want to know what it means to Jett Harmon who’s sitting in third period with a hole in his sock.

I understand art interpretation. I get it. We take everything we know about the artist, their life, the political and socio-economic influences of their time, their place in the world, their health, their life’s work. We take all of that (and more) and pool it together to draw meaning from what they’ve produced. But in doing so, I wonder if we’re missing the point. Are we, the ordinaries, allowed to decide what it means to us?

When I was about ten, I wrote a poem about an old, faded dress that got packed away in the attic and forgotten. I shared it with my mom’s friend (a poet, herself), who read it and said, “Oh! You have secrets!” Her observation was news to me, but I nodded, because the idea of having secrets felt exciting. What she saw in my poem had nothing to do with what motivated me to write it, but her response delighted me anyway. It was at that moment that I knew, in a sort of unshakeable way, that what we put into our work might not be what comes out the other side.

Something irreversible happens when art makes its way through the world. It passes through hands and gallery walls, across tables and bookstore shelves – and with each exchange, it sheds and accumulates. It evolves. But what it means at any given moment is just one interpretation among the many the work will inspire over a lifetime. To insist otherwise is to mistake the seed for the garden.

Dylan Thomas wrote one of my favorite lines ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light’ in a poem for his dying father. For me, those words are less about death and more about strength and resilience in the face of what makes us feel powerless. I won’t be quiet in the face of injustice. Thomas gave his grief a shape, and then he handed it to the world. Now it belongs to whoever needs it. Sometimes it belongs to me.

That’s art. That’s how it does its work.

The ideas behind my designs or my writing are rarely obvious. A faded cement wall near the coast. Steel trusses glazed with rust. A conversation with a stranger. None of this is visible in the finished piece, nor should it be. The source belongs to me; the meaning belongs to whoever comes next.

Inspiration brings something into form. Interpretation sets it free – into the world, into other lives, into meanings the artist never imagined and cannot control. A field of wildflowers, perhaps. Take what you need. Press them, wear them, let them go to seed.

Whatever the art means to you is what it means.