It’s minus four degrees Celsius in Zurich and the pewter lake is as smooth as a fairy-tale mirror, reflecting white swans, white clouds, white snow on charcoal trees, slate-grey church steeples scratching at soft mist and low cloud. The winter world is black and white, muted, subdued, smothered in furs of fog, silent, still; it is a landscape of the interior, a world turned quietly in on itself. Up the hill, at the Kunsthaus, Niki de Saint Phalle’s wild, bodacious, colourful, cheerful, humorous Nanas have taken over, bursting out of the halls of the museum like uncontainable party guests. A carnival of mirror-shards and coloured noise and figures of impossible proportion and scale, all rounded curves – hearts, wings, breasts, bellies; mythical, mystical, fertile, magical – rubbing up against the raw concrete walls, a seduction, and explosion of joy.

De Saint Phalle’s women are joyful and dominate – they have taken over all the space, the physical and the imaginary. Her Nanas, her most famous works, appear humorous, cheerful, bursting with joy, but her art is also brutal, dark and disturbing. As a woman and as an artist, De Saint Phalle embodied the paradoxical, the ambivalent, the quality of inhabiting two polarised spaces at once. She completes the circle. In the wild colours, it feels like a subversion of suffering – a recognition of our preoccupation with it, and a reversal, a magic trick, a transfiguration – and erotic energy pulsing from the voluptuous lines and strong colours, something of Dorothy Iannone… Presented next to her shooting paintings (where the artist literally takes a shotgun to her work) are felt tip drawings. Where shall we make love? she asks... Sweet Sexy Clarice... Could we have loved? she asks elsewhere. Erotic energy is the opposite of death; it is the impulse to life and creativity, to Love in the broadest sense. It is a refusal to be crushed or contained, to accept pain as an end but rather as a fire to walk through.

“I was an angry young woman, but then there are many angry young men and women who still don’t become artists. I became an artist because I had no choice, so I didn’t need to make a decision. It was my fate. At other times in history, I would have been locked up for good in an asylum – but as it was, I was only under strict psychiatric supervision for a short while, with 10 electric shocks etc. I embraced art as my deliverance and a necessity.” Suffering physically from rheumatoid arthritis (to the extent that she could not get out of bed or move her hands during the creation of her Tarot Garden in Tuscany) and mentally from the trauma of severe sexual abuse by her father, her art is not an instrument for healing but rather a drive and outlet of a deeply artistic personality whose vision knew no bounds. The pain is the engine, the art not therapy but the concupiscence of suffering transformed into shapes and forms that demand to be noticed.

“I realised that there was nothing more shocking than joy,” said De Saint Phalle. There is glorious revolution in this statement, beauty, and an essential truth. There is something deeply revolutionary about fighting to hold onto the capacity for joy when the world would demand otherwise. It is a deeply resilient and creative act. The source of our regeneration is often the same source as the wound; new growth from the ground where the battle was fought, where something was maimed or killed. It’s not the pain that is creative in and of itself: pain is obliterating; it’s the force that is exerted by the imaginative body, the imagination, the right brain, the animating force, to grow beyond it somehow, to find the means to make the distress bearable. Not because we want to, but because we must. Creativity is a refusal to die from the pain; it’s choosing the life impulse. even if the creation is about death. Dante’s ninth and last circle of hell is a lake made of the frozen tears of Lucifer – lake Cocytus – where the worst sinners are stuck fast in ice. Creation is a reaching out from within to connect with something or someone other. The recent Nobel-prize winner Annie Erneaux offers this in her book Simple Passion: “Sometimes I wonder if the purpose of my writing is to find out whether other people have done or felt the same things or, if not, for them to consider experiencing such thing as normal. Maybe I would also like them to live out these very emotions in turn, forgetting that they once wrote about them somewhere.” We come alive in bodies not our own. We are shocked into a re-set or a re-see. We break the plate and put the shards back together to form a different pattern. It can whisper, like Erneaux, who explains that she is trying to recreate “that feeling anxiety and stupefaction, a suspension of moral judgment.” She strips transmitted experience to an exquisite point of simplicity, a representing of the most banal life experiences (a supermarket, driving, waiting for a lover) into something shocking in its intimacy – like interrupting two people in the act of making love – we see too far in.

Martin Solomon, singer and songwriter, describes leaning “into the stretchy creative side” as a positive way to engage with pain. It is part of our wholeness, the balance of our creative, ‘light’ side… “Creativity is a psychologically re-organising process in which we transform our shadow tendencies into something useful,” he explains. We harness the destruction and the darkness; in balance, they make us whole… Solomon accepts the darkness in his life as a necessary counterpoint to the light, and in the struggle to do so quite literally regained his voice. “The process of making art can change the way you relate to something, even if you can’t change the thing itself.” For him, songs are “expressions often of emotions we feel but cannot process on our own.”

Nick Cave, another songwriter, has said increasingly he feels the separation of the experiences of the artist to the art, that “if we are doing good stuff, we are completely implicated within our songwriting.” The songwriting is a redemptive force, “it’s the good we can do from our faulty, messed up selves.” Or, perhaps, as Tennessee Williams put it: “If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels.”

Do we need to suffer to create great art, to access this resilience in the face of annihilation? It’s a question debated so often it has moved beyond cliche to the banal. The emphasis is wrong, as if suffering were sui generis, some self-generating alchemic ingredient that elevated the banal to the sublime. The magic is rather in the sensitivity. Openness and receptivity to the world around us quivers for the good and the bad – it is not suffering that is necessary but rather a receptivity that is exquisitely sensitive to all things, including suffering: personal, societal, planetary. A hyper-receptor, a sensibility wondersmitten and devastated in the space of a day, an hour, within the same moment, is a sensitivity that will seek to make sense of itself, to connect like an atom to others in an effort to survive. Inner struggles are the sign of someone who is awake, a sign of someone in touch with their subconscious. This is the gift. We are together in joy and alone in our pain. The creative effort is a gesture towards connection; it beginning, a matchstick at a time, to build a ladder out of the pain. As Louise Bourgeois, cutting and chipping, repairing with her needle, declared: “I transform nasty work into good work, I transform hate into love… that’s what makes me tick.” Trauma for Bourgeois is the crucial energy driving her work. Her works titled I Do I Undo I Redo illuminate her process – we rethread and repurpose, we come back from the body blows, stitched, supply, resilient. She was a self-described ‘guerrilla fighter’, using her spiders and spirals, her cells, her tapestry heads, her janus to express the ambivalence; the two very separate forces that are relentlessly attached together within us.

Another artist friend in Berlin described his relationship to pain: “What we resist only grows stronger. If we do not face our pain and accept it as a ‘friend’, as part of us, it becomes ossified, lodged in the past. It appears when we don’t expect it, unsurmountable, to derail us. We have to become friends with our pain.” When we become friends with our pain, we expand our emotional register. Our Umwelt – our unique sensory world – grows larger. As my cousin Juliet Darling, an artist and filmmaker who knows her way around the walls of agony says: “Lean into your pain; it will make your work better.” Mika Utzon Popov, a Danish artist, places pain in the context of the cyclical nature of seasons: “Winter is the season for introspection, where we strip ourselves naked in the darkness of reflection and emerge at first light with more clarity. It is a necessary process of creativity to expand and contract.” The presence of pain is a kind of distillation. It causes the iron filings of our feelings to run together in black forms and coalesce. Pain is the energetic opposite of the expansive force of joy, it is a collapsing. It is a winter and must be weathered the same way: the bruises on the soul gently pressed and the question asked: where does it hurt? Pain accepted passes through you – maybe one wave, maybe over and over for weeks or months or forever. This is inevitable. The resilience comes from facing it head on; courage comes from this. Radical acceptance is powerful. It gives you back the sense of control that suffering takes away. Like courage, resilience requires adversity to appear. From resilience can grow HOPE.

The word floats too freely like a balloon or a greeting card. True hope requires work. Critical thinking mixed with optimism is hope. Hope is not blithely assuming things will turn out for the best – this is as powerless as thinking nothing will ever get better. Having true hope is a job. It buds from resilience and helps you make the choice, day by day, hour to hour, to pick life, to have the courage to keep loving. LOVE, says Ram Dass, cannot be coerced but must be awakened. What you love you can lose, but it can also never be taken from you. That’s the beautiful paradox: “to possess the key is to lose it.”

Curiosity is the other expression. Curiosity, love and imagination mix as creativity; Einstein said, “creativity is intelligence at play” – to play we have to have hope. Cynics don’t play; children play. “The fact that we continue to fall in love with people and ideas and places is not evidence about cupidity or dumbness, but our strength. When we love… really love… in any way, we are announcing to the world that we intend to survive,” said Tennessee Williams. Time collapses when we are suffering – all is present. The past and future collide; we feel pain as eternity. To lean in and examine it is to pick it apart, to examine the pieces, to detonate the bomb. We search for Joan Didion’s ‘sermon in the suicide’ wanting to know the agony is not for nothing. Like Erneaux, we bargain and make pacts with our God – anything to help us feel we are in control of ourselves, that we can escape this pain. Active engagement with it can bring us closer to a fully inhabited existence, to living. I remind myself that if I seek a grand and romantic life dotted with moments of transcendence, this is the tithe. The fractures caused by pain can become the shards of a kaleidoscope made up of hope, love, and defiance. We create other ways of seeing, we create alternative outcomes, we build a ladder out of our pain.