• Handmade folio
• 22 pages
• 29.7 x 42 cm / 11.7 x 16.5 inch
• Unique handmade covers
• Edition of 23
• Signed & numbered
• 2013

1. Thou shalt not force thy neighbor to alter his consciousness.

2. Thou shalt not prevent thy neighbor from altering his consciousness. *

‘The government, which violates the second of these commandments every day, is now beginning to violate the first, forcing students in some schools to take Ritalin, an amphetamine – like drug that quiets unruly children but may have side effects not yet known. It is likely, given the general character of governments, that similar violations will multiply beyond all our guesses when bureaucrats discover that they have such delightful new toys as drugs that will reduce whole populations to perpetual childhood, decrease their aggressive rebelliousness, stunt their alertness and generally turn them into the drones described by Aldous Huxley in his Brave New World. The heretic of the 21st Century might be, not a man who takes a drug the government forbids, but a man who refuses a drug the government commands.’

Robert Anton Wilson (final paragraph from Sex, Drugs & Magick, 1987)

*Timothy Leary

“In treating my photographs this way,” he says, “photocopying the original colour prints, messing with the contrast, cutting into them, degrading or attacking them, in a sense – it gives them a unity that more readily evokes some of the darker themes I am interested in: the idea of dead or non-time, that space to be endured between the periods of exaltation that occur during the mass communions of dance and drugs.”That, in turn, brings me back to one of my primary interests as an artist: the age-old themes of mortality and aloneness that the subjects are consciously or unconsciously engaged in attempting to overcome and how, in this particular context, that fundamental need can be manipulated, commodified and exploited.”

Gareth McConnell talking to Sean O'Hagan in The Observer