Joy Is Inherited Through Shared Rituals, Places and Symbols
Artist Yinka Ilori argues that joy is less a private achievement than an inheritance carried through family rituals, places and gatherings. Drawing on his Nigerian parents’ life in London and Instagram responses about people’s earliest joyful memories, Ilori found that togetherness appeared in about 80 percent of accounts, ahead of nature, freedom, growth and stillness. He turns those memories into a visual language of shared symbols, intended to make transgenerational joy visible and transferable.
Joy, in Ilori’s responses, is mostly a matter of togetherness
Togetherness dominated Yinka Ilori’s audience accounts of joy. Around 80 percent of responses carried a sense of connection: something shared and inherited rather than individual. Ilori gathered the responses through Instagram, asking what joy looked like and about people’s earliest joyful memories. He says no respondent spoke about personal achievement.
His on-screen chart categorized the responses into five themes. Togetherness was the largest; nature followed at around 65 percent, with plants, sunlight, open space, and the sensory qualities of light, texture and smell. About half of the responses invoked freedom through movement, exploration, anticipation or a lack of restrictions. Others described growth—joy that appears gradually, sometimes through struggle—or stillness, where joy can be quiet.
| Theme | How Ilori described it |
|---|---|
| Togetherness | Around 80%; connection, shared experience and inherited rather than individual joy |
| Nature | Around 65%; plants, sunlight, open space, light, texture and smell |
| Freedom | About half; movement, exploration, anticipation and no restrictions |
| Growth | Joy that is not immediate and may emerge over time or through struggle |
| Stillness | A smaller number of responses; joy can be quiet |
Ilori translated selected submissions into a visual vocabulary: a mushroom, cooking pot, cashew tree, garden, sports car, sunrise, mountain path, palm-wine cup and bare feet. He paired them with symbols from his own archive, including ripples of laughter, precious joy, connection, community and “surrounded with love.”
The resulting artwork stretched across three screens in repeated horizontal bands of symbols beneath the phrase, “WITH JOY ALL THINGS ARE POSSIBLE.” Ilori described it as an artwork celebrating transgenerational joy: an attempt to turn the impressions he received into something shareable and visible.
His symbols began in a family life built around gathering
Ilori’s reading of those responses comes from a personal archive. He grew up at 27 Ashby House on a London council estate, raised by Nigerian parents who had moved to the UK in the 1980s. Before visiting the places his parents called home—Ondo State for his mother and Ekiti State for his father—he had formed a strong sense of connection to them through their stories and associations: sunlight, rock landscapes, springs, nature and communal life.
In London, those inherited worlds took material form. His mother bought and sold Swiss voile lace, catered weddings and birthdays, and kept treasured objects in a glass display cabinet. His father, known as Uncle Paul, worked in retail and, Ilori says, made himself a source of support and warmth for colleagues. For a time, the family ran a corner shop that drew children after school, neighbors, estate residents and passersby.
Their flat and shop were places where people assembled. Sundays brought church services, sermons, worship, affirmation, singing and movement. House parties brought live music, jollof rice, different languages and different journeys into one small home. Ilori characterizes his mother as an “architect of joy” because she made occasions, objects and people meet.
I didn't realize I was experiencing a daily baptism of joy, a joy that had been passed on from generation to generation without even knowing it.
The color, objects and patterns in Ilori’s work draw on repeated practices of hospitality, worship, celebration, work and care. “Transgenerational joy” is his name for what those rituals carried from Nigeria to London and into his own work.
The method is to turn memories into a visual language
Ilori says he developed the same collecting impulse he saw in his mother, but with symbols rather than objects. His archive includes a sun, rock, hands, star and talking drum, alongside flowers, water, waves, an eye, a wheel, temple steps, a pineapple and an ice-cream cone. At first he did not know why he was drawn to them. Later, he recognized them as memories of what brought him joy when he was young: Ondo sunlight, rituals, community and gatherings.
Visual storytelling is how you unlock the stories we already carry.
For Ilori, visualizing those memories is how he “harvests” joy. He describes his work as uncovering stories rather than inventing them, then reimagining them through his own lens. The Instagram exercise applied that process outward: people connected early memories of joy to symbols, and Ilori selected responses to pair with images from his own archive.
The responses were, he says, already visual. A cooking pot, a tree, a sunrise or a sports car could carry a remembered place, relationship or experience. Their pairing with his symbols made those recollections available to share from person to person and generation to generation.