SEANA GAVIN

The collage and archive artist on a career built on London’s raves, the free party scene and the magical power of mushrooms

“There's two different sides to my work. One is handcut collage landscapes, where I use found material from old books and magazines and create otherworldly landscapes. And then the other side is a large archive of photography from 1993 to 2003, when I documented the free party scene in London and across Europe.”

Visual artist and Londoner Seana Gavin is explaining the two different styles that make up her critically acclaimed work. There’s the psychedelic, tactile collages she painstakingly creates, and her documentary photography work. These images captured a world that few people had access to, because Gavin wasn’t just an observer of the DIY rave scene that mapped out across the UK and Europe, but an enthusiastic participant. Her travels with anarchic soundsystem Spiral Tribe are documented in the brilliant book, Spiralled.

“London played a big part in that,” she says of her early inspiration and experiences. “Growing up in the city, and becoming involved with the free party scene in the early 90s. London was definitely where it all stemmed from.” The resulting images - dreamlike and faded with time - look as much a portrait of a lost world as her psychedelic collages.

Gavin’s collage work has a bold style with texture and colour being mixed. “Fungi often become part of these worlds,” she explains. “It's the aesthetic of them, just the incredible variety of forms and shapes and colors they come in. And I also associate them with fairy tales like Alice in Wonderland, the old sci fi films that I saw as a child, which maybe influenced what I do.”

Ultimately, all of Gavin’s work - despite its otherworldly quality - leads back to the city that first sparked her imagination. “I guess a lot of those early subcultures - punk, the swinging sixties - first stemmed from London. Maybe it's just something about being an island. In that early 90s era, subcultures seemed much more present - but London definitely was the stem of it all.”

Take a look at Seana's work on social @seanagavin

And Seana's book Spiralled can be found here