This project is an animation inspired by Zadie Smith’s essay “Joy.” It began as a reflection on her distinction between joy and pleasure, and how joy can feel less immediate but more expansive and difficult to define.
Rather than following a narrative structure, the work explores these ideas through abstract visual movement and repetition. It focuses on how emotional states can shift over time, using texture, color, and rhythm to suggest different layers of feeling.
Through a series of evolving frames, the project translates the essay’s ideas into a visual language, where joy is not presented as a fixed emotion, but as something fluid, unstable, and continuously unfolding.
