Madness and creativity

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Anders Stoll Overgaard

Article
October 3rd 2025

From the walls of prehistoric caves to the flicker of a contemporary video installation, human beings have always left their marks, sounds, and gestures in the world. It’s like an instinctive urge to materialize and share ourselves. Could it be that this thing we call art is not so much about beauty, or even meaning, but rather about a social need to process our inner life and make it tangible? To touch and be touched? To move and be moved? To know and be known?

I recently finished Jeanette Winterson’s book Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? and it took me an unnecessarily long time to read it. I did like the book, but for some reason I kept putting it away. That’s also why I find it ironic that, in the end, this book would give me such a clear argument for art’s importance in our lives, and the healing potential of creative practice. This argument took shape of a pentagon in my head––a five-sided progression of emotional motivations for creating things. A dynamic that I see repeating itself differently in life. In this article I would like to share this model with you, and reflect a bit on being, on art, and on creativity in regard to Winterson’s descriptions of writing as a method to survive.

In Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Winterson states that books saved her life. As a child trapped in silence and repression, she found in language a method to translate trauma into words and thus a healing potential in writing and creativity. In the book she writes: “Going mad is the beginning of a process. It is not supposed to be the end result. [C]reativity is on the side of health—it isn’t the thing that drives us mad; it is the capacity in us that tries to save us from madness.” She uses the process of making as a hopeful act to heal whereto she elaborates: “Everyday I went to work, without a plan, without a plot, to see what I had to say. And that is why I am sure that creativity is on the side of health. I was going to get better, and getting better began with the chance of the book.”

Her approach to writing as a method to survive and tame a sort of madness is what initially made me think of the pentagon and what creative practices do for us. Thus the pentagon turns out to be an emotional map of movements and motivations for making things and express ourselves in (art)works. It is almost like an aesthetic journey from urgency to peace, from silence to voice, all through the productive act of making.

The pentagon is a five-sided model that reflects on or suggests emotional motivations for making things. A journey from trauma to love, from chaos to peace.

Now, the pentagon is a simple five-sided figure where each corner, in this case, represents different emotional states in a creative process. These states progress from trauma to madness through creativity toward relief, until they finally rest at love. Together, they form a cycle, not a straight line. Not a checklist, but a rhythm. Trauma is a state of silence, and represents a stillness in us that prevents anything from being said and done. This is where the unsolved dwells and where a problem, concern og wondering sleeps. At some point, the trauma begins to move in us which is toward a state of madness––an uncontrolled and unpredictable eruption that cracks the silence and activates a restless energy that refuses to stay buried. Madness is movement and it makes us do things instinctively and maybe randomly. This movement unlocks a creative potential where a need to concretize what we feel tames the eruption. It is a constructive energy of material form––words, colors, sounds, gestures. It is a doing that at some point will provide an openness toward a form of relief. The now concretized feelings have left the body in material form and they now exist outside of us. The trauma is no longer only ours to carry, but is something that can be analyzed, objectified, reflected on. It is us breathing out and preparing for the love that makes us look back, softly and without terror, at both our wound and our work. Love will provide a sense of peace and a realization of the unsolved being solved. New perspectives can now pave a way for growth that will allow us to move forward.

Inevitably, this cycle will start over, but with a different purpose built on new motives, and in different forms manifested in new works. That’s how it is for us humans I guess––the questions keep on coming and we keep on creating.

This pentagon is a thought experiment that is supposed to suggest a concrete way to look at art as a creative practice that helps us reflect, transform, and, ultimately, heal. It visualizes a process from urgency to a state of peace all through the pivot of creativity. The model is not prescriptive, and it obviously doesn’t belong only to artists. It belongs to anyone who has ever scribbled in the margins, hummed a tune, or felt the need to make something. It’s a reminder that making things is not necessarily just a hobby, a job or a luxury, but possibly a fundamental human instinct to process what cannot otherwise be carried or understood.

When I look at art history through this lens, I see less the grand narrative of styles and movements, and more a series of attempts—sometimes desperate, sometimes playful, but always deeply human. Attempts to make the invisible visible, and to find meaning in the overwhelming abstractions of life. Francisco Goya, in his Black Paintings (1819–23), covered the walls of his own house with grotesque, terrifying images. Saturn devouring his son. Witches, demons, grotesque faces in the dark. He painted not for the market or the salon, but for himself only, directly on plaster, as if exorcising an inner chaos. Maybe these paintings were not about survival in the literal sense, but an attempt to concretize and give shape to the fear, violence, and silence that Goya experienced in his later years, suffering from an unknown illness, depression, and a loss of hearing.

This tendency of exorcising an inner life echoes throughout history. Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893) is a work that vibrates with real experiences of panic that––both personal and universal. Frida Kahlo paints her own body split open, pierced, broken—and yet steady enough to stare back at us as a way to not only show but also reclaim a sense of control over her own being. Van Gogh’s turbulent skies are perhaps not symptoms of a madness either, but rather attempts to make turbulence tangible, brushstroke by brushstroke. And in queer contemporary practices, Felix Gonzalez-Torres pours his grief into candy, asking strangers to participate in the mourning of his lover lost to AIDS. Artworks becomes here a translation of something unspeakable and uncontrollable, and a material way of processing and embracing an overwhelming reality.

Art is always communicative in this way. It does not stay inside. It leaks, it spills, it points, it asks. Björk’s Vulnicura (2015) is another example of how artistic practices helps contextualizing what’s tricky to grasp. It is heartbreak pressed into sound—an album she described as an open wound, but by externalizing it, Björk makes it shareable. We listen, we enter, we recognize ourselves in it, and when she later turns to Utopia (2017), an album with layers of flutes and birdsong turned into luminous textures of optimism, she offers another sonic language: one of relief and softness, where we get a glimpse of spacious and tender futures. As if the two albums together manifest the pentagon’s creative journey from trauma to love and from grief to acceptance.

Perhaps this is why I find the five-sided model so generative. It points out that art can be an orientation. An act of learning how to move with the things we do not understand, to materialize the abstract and risk a healing honesty in the presence of others.

I know this, too, from my own experience, because for me, making music has always been a constructive form of working with melancholy, structuring it into something external, something that can be understood better and shared. But I have feared this honesty and hesitated to show my work because of the risk of being solely identified with my melancholy. This fear is what makes the pentagon vital to me, as it keeps the emphasis on the movement from one place to another. To create and to be in a transformative process and making art is to move with yourself, to translate yourself, to gain perspective on whatever it is that you are feeling. It is not to define the self once and for all, but to nurture a flexible mode of being.

In this regard, art becomes a tool, creativity a method. Together, a material way to get out of the fog and move toward clarity. It becomes way of knowing and understanding the world on new terms, and perhaps this is also what Winterson reminds us when she describes writing as a path to become familiar with a kind of love she was never shown as a child: “Love is there but we have to learn it – and its shapes and its possibilities… We have a capacity for language. We have a capacity for love. We need other people to release those capacities. In my work I found a way to talk about love – and that was real. I had not found a way to love. That was changing.”