Exhibition: Wellcome Gallery filled with coloured mist

Wellcome Collection will launch a year-long exploration into the experience of human consciousness with a new installation by Ann Veronica Janssens. The artist will fill an entire gallery with an enveloping and brightly coloured mist in a work called yellowbluepink.

Janssens explores perception through the use of light and colour. In her mist installation at Wellcome Collection, colour is caught in a state of suspension, defying the apparent immateriality of the medium and veiling any detail of surface or depth within the space. As visitors walk through this thickly coloured world, attention is focussed on the process of perception itself - an experience both disorienting and uplifting, heightening the wonder of our own consciousness. Entering the gallery is to submit to colour as a physical entity and to be subsumed by the experience of seeing.

Ann Veronica Janssens’s installation launches States of Mind, a year-long investigation into human consciousness; a topic defined as much by what is yet to be understood as what can be readily explained. At the heart of the subject lies the ‘hard question’ of why objective brains give rise to our subjective consciousness. Neuroscience can explain the relationship between brain activity and conscious functions such as memory retention or decision making. Yet it struggles to describe how the activity of neurons results in our individual experience of colour, as in Janssen's vibrant environment.