BOOK

Selected Images from ‘Crowded Mind’ – Hand bound book, 6 soft-ground etchings, and 7 photo-etchings (small edition)

I was challenged about my work by a peer saying they just didn’t see the vulnerable quality in it. I thought about this for a long time. Was I being too safe? Too detached?

During a decade of psychotic episodes I have kept notebooks. The texts aren’t diaries so much as mindful mutterings and a way to excrete thoughts from a confused cacophony of sounds and images; they are documents. I read them. I remind myself when I am tempted to go back what it is really like; I remind myself when I am happy I am out, what I have lost.

Extracts from these psychotic documents are used in this piece. For the illustrations I felt a connection with the way the mind is separated between sanity and insanity by such a frail and pregnable barrier. Ladders in tights felt like an elegant representation of the disintegration into a different state of mind.

‘Crowded Mind’, by J Price