States of Mind: Tracing the Edges of Consciousness is an exhibition developed by Wellcome Collection to interrogate our understanding of the conscious experience.
Anna Faherty worked with Wellcome Collection’s curatorial and publishing teams and Hato Press to conceive, develop and project-manage the accompanying publication, States of Mind: Experiences at the Edge of Consciousness. The book is a collection of literature, science, philosophy and art, with a specially commissioned introduction by Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
The 90+ works explore the meaning of consciousness and, in particular, the nature of interrupted or liminal states, such as somnambulism, synaesthesia and disorders of memory. featured authors include Jane Austen, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rene Descartes, Philip K Dick, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, Wassily Kandinsky, Timothy Leary, HP Lovecraft, Haruki Murakami, Marcel Proust, Mary Shelley, Alan Turing, HG Wells and Emile Zola.
Read Anna’s post about how literature helps us slip into other people’s souls on Wellcome Collection’s blog or Mark Haddon’s introduction, serialised in the Telegraph.
States of Mind featured in the Observer as ‘paperback of the week’ and was awarded Best New Exhibition Catalogue at the 2017 Association for Cultural Enterprises Best Product Awards.
Anna is the safest ‘pair of hands’ I have ever encountered in publishing. She is a gifted writer, strategist and creative conceiver of projects as well as a meticulous editor and planner. A rare combination.
This compelling collection … cuts to the heart of existence.
