I’m obsessed!: Why following fixations makes our creative work better

On September 13 2008 in Waagdragerhof Square, Amsterdam, graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister began placing a very large collection of 250,000 Euro cents onto the floor, one by one. Over the course of the next eight days with the hands of over 100 volunteers, the coins were carefully laid out over the 300 square metre area to spell out a single sentence: “Obsessions make my life worse and my work better.”

A ‘medium is the message’ kind of project, this shiny collection shared something that might speak to a lot of creative minds. I first found the quote, quite fittingly, in a bit of a research hole for a brief on my art foundation course and it’s stuck with me ever since. I had always felt that my creative work came at quite a cost compared to other things. Every now and then, all day to day obligations dissipated, and I failed to be interested in anything beyond my studio desk — the sign of a good project emerging became this feeling of going a bit mad, simply because you wanted to spend all your time sitting with its subject.

In a description of the installation Sagmeister writes: “​​I rarely obsess about things in my private life. I fail to care about the right shade of green for the couch [and so on], however I do obsess over our work and I think that a number of our better projects came out of such an obsession.”

If obsessions are defined as ideas or thoughts that continually preoccupy or intrude our mind, then a lot of creatives might be found guilty of obsessing over something in their work; a certain idea definitely, a format, or perhaps even a process. These obsessions might temporarily tilt us off balance between work and life, but they certainly take us to unexpected places creatively. But how do we know when to follow them? And when have we gone too far? Is it always useful to indulge in our fascinations? When do we know if we’ve dropped down a rabbit hole too far to come back up with any fruitful finds?

Whichever way we look at it, these fixations sit firmly as a driving force in our creative work. Artists have built whole careers, collections or creative identities off the back of their obsessions – Yayoi Kusama’s dots, Dali’s eggs, Damien Hurst’s very large collection of taxidermy animals… So, is there a link between being creative and having a tendency to go all in? The prevailing stereotypes of the ‘very specific’ designer or obsessive artist might have swayed the idea of being very occupied by our interests to be seen in a negative light. But maybe we need to shake off some of the stigma surrounding obsession and start to take a wander down the paths our intrinsic interests lead us down – all in the interest of making better creative work.

I can’t stop thinking about: Bread, hardware, Drag Race… living as a mountain goat?

If there is one thing creative brains are very good at, it’s paying attention to things people might normally just pass by. A lot of us can become quite easily obsessed with completely ordinary or mundane things that turn into the starting point for a creative project, and the more we magnify them, the more they appear to be beautiful.

Take artist and designer Liang-Jung Chen, for example. In the development of their wonderful collection of items that you might find under the sink or in your family toolbox (also known as The Hardware Archive), they turned a habit of “collecting items at local hardware shops” – small, humble things that they are “utterly obsessed with” – into a satisfying online exhibition that frames these finds with an investigation into their material culture.

Similarly, New York-based artist, writer and baker Lexie Smith has turned to something we eat every day without a second thought for a creative muse, biting into the potential of bread through her archive and online resource, Bread on Earth. In her Nicer Tuesdays talk last month, the artist shared: “The more obsessed with bread I got, the easier it was to convince other people that they should care about it also,” the project itself uncovering the humble foodstuff to be “a material, an object and an idea” that is “a gateway to bigger conversations about what it means to be human.” This understanding of bread as a “kind of lingua franca” has led her to make The Bread Web: An intriguing open source database of global bread types based on years of her research, soon to go live.

Whilst Lexie and Liang might have followed interests that reframed what we know as familiar, forcing us to see their subjects in a new light, some of our creative obsessions can at first, be much more, well… out of the ordinary. Designer and writer Thomas Thwaites, for example, is famed for becoming very interested in the idea of taking a holiday from being a human to live as a mountain goat, a project that he outlines in his second book: Goat Man (his first being: The Toaster Project, the journey of his attempt to make a toaster, from scratch, only using raw materials.)

Thomas’ projects often start with obsessions with weird and wonderful concepts that are very simple but, from the outset, seemingly impossible to achieve:“Sometimes the research stage just explodes into this impossible feat,” he says, “and you realise that what you’ve set out to do could be an entire PhD”, he shares.

Against all odds, the designer did in fact have a short stint living as a goat, and produced a nearly working toaster by hand, but each project wasn’t exactly smooth sailing once the joy of an initial obsession inevitably faded (as it does for a lot of us), and each projects’ practicalities set in. Our creative ideas can, in themselves, become “a sort of mini obsession at the start of a project,” he says, “getting excited about them, thinking about them and exploring them is the fun bit and the difficult part is, deciding to carry on even after the obsession with the idea has worn off.”

The driver then is getting to the finish line, and despite the outwardly absurd nature of his projects, the motivation to do so often comes from “a fear of failure or embarrassment, in a weird sort of way”, he says, or the ever-so-helpful effects of an impending deadline. But when you start to get somewhere with a project, there’s this brilliant point when “an initial personal obsession morphs into a kind of narrative tool”, the designer shares. Less interesting than the nuts and bolts of putting it all together, producing a project in a way that other people are sure to share in your interests becomes the motivating goal for Thomas, after the initial buzz. “If you really just let the obsession take over, then you wouldn’t care about telling anyone else about it, or sharing it or documenting it as a story,” Thomas says.

So not going too far down the rabbit hole means that we don’t make things niche and incomprehensible to others, with no way of resurfacing with something that makes sense. But what about sharing our obsessions when they feel quite vulnerable, how will we know – even when we make something great out of them – that other people will share our passions too? What if we are interested in things that don’t seem so compelling to everyone else?

Illustrator Juanjo Cristiani has virtually managed to build a career out of his childhood obsession with Disney witches: think Ursula, Maleficent, and the Evil Queen from Snow White. “There was something alluring, mesmerising about their mystical aura”, he shares. “I was fascinated by everything they represented: mystery, power, intrigue, the occult.” One obsession led to another (as it often does) and this saw Juanjo take a deep dive into the symbolism and semantics of the world of tarot.

Now owner of Enjoy My Cake, an online shop that turns pop culture into tarot cards, the illustrator earns a portion of his living from combining this obsession with his current interests in pop culture, selling tarot sets to a huge following and much fanfare. One of our favourite collections has to be his Drag Race deck. “As a queer person, pop culture has shaped so much of my identity, my passions, and my creative lens. So blending tarot with pop culture felt like the most natural thing in the world – it was inevitable”, he says. For the illustrator, this obsession with the format of the tarot deck has been “an incredible catalyst for creative projects”, helping him “build bridges between the mystical and the mainstream.”

So, if we trust our instincts, even something as special as the magic of our childlike creative imagination can resurface, and make us pretty successful in our own fields, no matter how niche. Interest-led work has a funny way of finding others that are quite compelled by the subject too. When projects are founded on personal fascinations, they are always more fun – to steal Juanjo’s words, creativity does in fact “thrive when it’s fed by joy, curiosity, and the things that make us feel alive.”

I’m never masking when I’m making

For neurodiverse creatives, obsessions can take on a different meaning. With 20 - 50 per cent of the creative industry being neurodiverse (compared to around 15 per cent of the general population in the UK), this might explain why many of us like to pursue our obsessions through our creative projects – it satisfies our interest-led brains. Our practices can become an immersion into research that we can’t venture elsewhere, or at least in as much depth as we’d like. For both autistic and ADHD creatives in particular, obsessions come quite naturally. Special interests and hyperfixations can propel our creative explorations into uncharted and exciting areas, and or allow us to sustain our investigations over a long period of time, in doing so developing an expertise in a certain area.

To say digital artist Rose Pilkington is an expert on colour might be an understatement. Her vibrant 3D illustration and motion work serves as a thoughtful tribute to the natural world and its rich colours, textures and patterns. In her Nicer Tuesdays talk in London last November, the ADHD creative claimed her love and fascination for colour to be the subject that “really makes her tick”, something that has “threaded its way into all of her work from the very beginning”. Letting her knowledge on colour and its psychological effects seep into her practice, the artist has leveraged its powerful impact as a technical tool for visual communication.

As well as developing certain expertise from hyperfixations or special interests, our creative work can simply provide an important place to express our preoccupations. Autistic creative Alice Poyzer has been completely in awe of anything animal related all of her life; whether it be “taxidermy collections or best in breed dog shows”, the photographer has surrounded herself “with anything related to the topic”. This obsession started her project Other Joys, a photo series that explores the intense enthusiasm and euphoria of this special interest.

“As I continue to create Other Joys,” Alice shares,“I’m provided with a safe space to feel at ease and to unmask. I’ve been able to experience my autistic joy to the fullest throughout this project – something that I cannot always access in day-to-day life.” Often what fuels projects like these is “wanting to be around the subject matter all the time”, she says, “but the more I went on, the more I understood my own autistic traits”, she shares – which in itself, became a key motivator to continue her photo story.

Similar to Alice’s process of self discovery, art director Lorna Allan and illustrator Jhinuk Sarkar started a collaboration over their podcast Square Hole back in 2022, following their late diagnoses as neurodiverse creatives. Through the podcast, they set out to interview a variety of creatives and experts to discuss why there are such strong links between neurodiversity and creativity – a project that allowed them to recognise commonalities in the neurodiverse experience and discover things about their own creative processes.

One being that neurodiverse brains don’t like to take conventional routes: “Sometimes you can be very attracted to difficulty in a way,” shares Lorna. “I feel like I'm very drawn to something that’s going to be quite hard. I will somehow always choose the most difficult pathway possible in a project.”

This can transfer to following our fixations: “Because you are so inspired you do take more difficult routes, but that’s actually a benefit – that way of working comes up with different answers or solutions,” adds Jhinuk. It has become clear to both creatives that the approaches they take to projects are “certainly not going to be a cookie cutter of other illustrators and art directors” and whilst that does occasionally cause some difficulty, for the most part it makes “diverse work that stands out” shares Jhinuk. “Everyone doing the same thing all the time isn’t true creativity. That kind of following isn’t going to generate anything new.”

So the depth neurodiverse creatives might go into when we follow our interests without any assumed destination, simply because we love to explore at length, might eventually be what splits our work apart from the crowd. Our divergent way of going about the creative processes or as Lorna calls it “not a straightforward step one to four”, is what breeds out of the box results.

Going down the rabbit hole might be for the greater good of the work

When Rotterdam-based design studio From Form stood up on stage to talk about their creative practice at London’s February Nicer Tuesdays, they left the crowd with one lesson from years of practice: the importance of listening to our fascinations. For the studio, following their fascinations has “led to an intrinsic way of working – that can spark joy and surprise you in a lot of ways, but yet make you feel very connected to the work,” shares co-founder Jurjen Versteeg. To illustrate this idea they likened creative inspiration to the landscape of a flea market: “a beautiful mess; unorganised, unstructured places that aren’t dictated by any algorithms.” The kind of environments that “force you to hunt for things that really directly speak to you.”

Therefore our obsessions, fascinations or fixations, (whichever word we might pick to describe them) are things that are always deeply personal to us, or in Jurjen’s words, “a combination of everything you have seen, heard or felt in your life feeding into your work”, and perhaps the most honest leads to making authentic or intrinsic projects.

If the creative process is one of self discovery then it seems like it will always be a good idea to follow what has fascinated us deeply, rather than hide it. The tricky part, as Thomas Thwaites points out, might just be working out which ones to choose, and how to translate the story of these interests into a language that allows others to share in them too.

Obsessions are a vehicle for us to make important creative discoveries about ourselves and the things beyond us, or in Jhinuk Sarkar’s words, to figure out “why we do what we do, whether that’s picking up a paintbrush or taking a photograph.” Unfolding an obsession is, in a way, giving in to our “creative compulsions” and accepting them. Something that – even if only temporarily – manages to silence the constant “What is it for? Who is it for?” feeling of creativity.