Joy
Playing with the camera on a beautiful day this summer, exploring light over water. ©Annegret Fauser
I was in the studio this morning, and I could not even begin to make art. I felt unsettled and insecure. Yes, I had traveled to a scholarly conference in Denver, and the three weeks between travel, preparation, and actual event had taken me away from the daily rhythm of creating, but I also wondered whether I would ever be good enough an artist to warrant dedicating such a big chunk of my time to creating fiber art and whether what I made mattered. Impostor syndrome—that nasty little beast—raised its ugly head and roared.
I did what I often do when things turn stressful: I talked with my wise husband whose deep love of music and knowledge translate into the beautiful words of his essays and books. Tim reminded me how much joy our favorite composer, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, had when exploring what was possible as he composed and made music. Such joy permeates the sounds of my favorite work, an aria for piano, voice, and orchestra that Mozart wrote for a much-loved singer, Nancy Storace. “Ch’io mi scordi di te” (K. 505) is a love duet between Mozart’s piano and Storace’s voice—a gloriously tender entwining of melodies echoing each other.
Listening to Mozart, I remembered that joy is a crucial element in the alchemy of creating: joy in making, joy in playing, joy in exploring, joy in being in the moment. Leaving aside the pressures of achievement, I remembered that I left the workforce not to make a career out of being an artist but to make art to feed my soul. And my heart singing with joy as I am painting, printing, layering, stitching offers miraculous moments of being.
What do I mean when writing about joy sparked through the act of creating? Contrary to its roots in Japanese Shintoism which holds that everything in our world is infused with the vibrations of gods, ancestors, and living beings, in the Western world of Netflix and self-help books, Mari Kondo’s famous question “Does it spark joy?” has become a transactional method of organizing one’s possessions. This materialistic reconfiguration for the West goes well with her specially designed line of boxes and other such containers.
Conversely, I have learned from the writings of the painter, Makoto Fujimura, that a key to true creative joy is what he describes as a gratuitous process of culture care, a form of making out of one’s love for the world and each other. It is not a process devoid of pain—in a recent talk he posited that “all art flows out of the fissures of our brokenness and trauma.” But it is art made for an audience of one, without commercial purpose, a creative process and experiential reality grounded in beauty—though beauty and perfection are two very different things when art serves to heal the shattered (as in the case of Japanese Kintsugi). Instead of gold holding pieces of pottery, thread—for me—becomes a reparative agent in the work I am making.
Fujimura’s writings echo with research dedicated over the past decades to human flourishing. I had already read about happiness and love; one of my former colleagues at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was Barbara L. Frederickson, whose book simply titled Positivity (2009) bears rereading. In a pre-pandemic workshop at the University of Pennsylvania in 2019, several colleagues and I reflected on how our work as musicians and music scholars connected with these ideas about human flourishing. The resulting book of essays has just been published. The concepts of human flourishing as a deep well of happiness are deeply entwined with the way I understand joy. It is—the Cambridge Dictionary tells us—“great happiness”: not a thing, not a method, but a profound state of being. This kind of joy is not a fleeting moment of laughter—though that, too, can bring joy—but a form of exuberant entanglement with something that might even carry sorrow. Mozart’s joy was one that reveled in a musical love duet that, nonetheless, meant saying goodbye to Storace as she packed her bags to return from Vienna to London.
In my studio, this joy can mean that I try—over and over again—to figure out the next steps; that I accept things might go badly when cutting into a beautiful piece of fabric I created earlier; that I battle with stitch to understand its reparative and creative dimensions; that what I make may not be “great” or even “decent” art. But joyfully making means that I can flourish as I play with glorious materials trying to capture some of the beauty of our magnificent albeit fragile world. Instead of fearing failure and feeding the nasty little beast of impostor syndrome, I embrace joy as a liberating state that takes me away from outcome and (self-)judgment: not transactionally but entirely gratuitously.
