Edited by Charlie Mills

ABSINTHE. Curious love of the sordid and the extravagant. Muse of the weird, twisted and eerie. Throughout its short history, absinthe has passed from antiseptic to vermicide, honorary salute to morphological being. It is ghostly and mutinous. It is no surprise that absinthe has long persisted in the underground, from Joyce to Baudelaire, Rimbaud to van Gogh. It was prolific amongst artists and writers of the boulevards of modern Paris: mystic visions of the Moulin Rouge, images that bled from their canvas with ane merald sorcery: hypnotic, aberrant and erotic. We have found the powers of absinthe lie beyond the natural and of nature; it is a phantom, aghost, an apparition. To drink absinthe is to taste magic. To pull back the curtain and see the other-worldly, the hidden and the clandestine. It is the love-drunk clamour of a birdsong after dark; a trill screech of obscenity from deep within the jungle. Swirling inside its harlequin eyes is a potent concoction of macerated herbs, wormwood, aniseed and fennel. Served through the ritual of La Louche, its billowing stomach creates a seeing stone, endowing its subject with fantasies beyond their control: hallucinations, delusions and fever-dreams.

The following publication has been produced in conjunction with ABSINTHE #1, the first of four major exhibitions of emerging artists over the course of 12 months that drew from this rich history of fantasy and sedition. Comprising a hybrid, eclectic and at points inexplicable presentation of the weirder side of London's emerging art scene, ABSINTHE #1evokes a mandala or artists that cut and splice between mediums and styles; a kaleidoscopic trip into the city's current alternative art practices. 

Contributors: Shadi Al-Atallah, Nancy Allen, Charlie Billingham, Luca Bosani, James Capper, Ollie Dook, Levi Draper, Billy Fraser, Alia Hamaoui, Byzantia Harlow, Andrew Pierre Hart, Serena Huang, Louis Judkins, Millie Layton, Ralph Hunter-Menzies, Finnian Mckenna, Rebecca Molloy, Polly Morgan, Jesse Pollock, Tom Ribot, George Rouy, Rhiannon Salisbury, Luke Samuel, Victor Seaward, Sanne Maloe Slecht, Mitch Vowles, Jim Woodall.