The Toy of the Spirit

Material is drawn from his 3-year practice of creating hand-written artist books and is the first time it has been widely available to the public. Mannix’s work centres on the documentation and investigation of his experiences of schizophrenia and, what is for him, madness’ implicit creativity and value.     

Mannix’s texts range widely in approach, employing humour and poetry, diaristic reflection, images, heart-felt emotion, anthropological cataloguing, description and explanation. By turns visionary, philosophical, experimental and erotic, Mannix’s writing, in all its varied manifestions is any unconscious worlds. He is, as he suggests, an anthropologist of the unconscious.     

‘[His work] opened, with some surprise, the eyes and minds of all those who visited to a very different world-one of madness and obsessive creativity, shocking and yet very exciting.’ - Carolynne Skinner, Oz Arts Magazine