Public interest in art created by people suffering from mental illnesses has been growing in recent years, while the topic is still relatively exotic in the academic world. In a unique research project at Zurich University of the Arts ZHdK, art works produced around 1900 by patients in mental asylums and hospitals in Switzerland have been recorded, documented, and examined. Their authors worked on many of them for long periods, always with dedication, and often revealing remarkable technical and artistic prowess. They saw their art as a contribution to public life, as their own invention and expression of their ideas, but also as an act to compensate for the dull life at, and criticism of, the institutions they were being treated. This field of art, and of art history, is subject to the dynamics of academic standards and, consequently, of inclusions and exclusions. This new book, featuring a manifold selection of previously unpublished art works, questions our contemporary understanding of art, making the reader revisit his or her own concept of what constitutes art and to engage with these artists and their work.

Elisabeth Faulhaber was born in south west Germany in 1890. By the time she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Doesen near Leipzig in 1914, she had worked in a factory, been a chambermaid and a waitress, and had had a child out of wedlock. She was an inmate of the hospital for six years, dying of tuberculosis in 1921, at the age of 31.She wrote, she drew and - according to hospital notes - scribbled unstoppably on furniture, floor, walls. A handful of her drawings survive, and six small notebooks. These now form part of the Prinzhorn Collection, Heidelberg. The notebooks show Elisabeth Faulhaber to have been intelligent and questioning. She was also often muddled to an extreme. Her work is imbued with sensibility. The notebooks varied subject matter and range of graphic invention show a wonderful artistic talent.Sarah Jacobs rendition of the notebooks contains more than 550 drawings by Faulhaber but, although the rendition contains one page for every page of the notebooks, it is not a facsimile. Instead, black and white photographs of the drawings have been reversed, and then partly erased so that what is presented is both faithful to the original, and insistently the opposite. Freely translated extracts from the Faulhaber 's texts have also been included, together with a selection of the poems and songs which Faulhaber copied into her notebooks. These have been left in the original German. The rendition has been produced in association with Sammlung Prinzhorn, UniversitaetsKlinikum, Heidelberg.Sarah Jacobs is an artist living in London.