Seana Gavin: cosmic worlds

on distant moons and remote mountaintops, crystals slowly grow starwards, while lichens, mosses and funghi creep across the landscape. mushroom clouds bloom on the horizon, while planets and insects hover under orange skies. as strange figures dance on hilltops, expressways cut through canyons made of rock and cities

this is the strange and wonderful world of collage artist Seana Gavin's mind and art: a surreal set of worlds composed of images from our world, but utterly different. with her first three dimensional work opening this week at b store, and being fans of a good diorama, we thought it high time we caught up her to talk all things cosmic...

the window display is based on your piece Sirius – what's it all about? it was something i was already working on – i've been looking into the Dogon tribe from Africa, who are the tribal figures and the mask you can see in the landscape. they were supposed to be related to the Egyptians and they had all this knowledge of the solar system, like they supposedly knew that Sirius has two other stars next to it, and the rings around Saturn, and all this stuff that at the time they'd have no way of knowing. scientists and astronomers didn't actually find this stuff out until centuries later. the theory is that they were visited by extraterrestrials from Sirius and given all this information, or at least that's what the theory claims

how much of your work is planned and how much is subconscious? i start with an idea or theme in my head of what i want to do and then i just go through all my material, which is really time consuming. i sometimes put things into folders or groups, then i loosely cut them out and start arranging them and it builds up from there. it's quite organic

you use a lot of starscapes and planets in your work, have you always been interested in space? when i was child i was obsessed with my parents' visual book collection, they had hundreds of art books and my dad was really into comics and science fiction. my work's not about reality, or where we are now, so yeah, it's more ideas of other worlds and other realities

what ideas are inspiring your current work? it's very much a combination of past and prehistoric times combined with the future. i think the times we're living in, there's so many earthquakes and natural disasters, and i think a lot of those kind of stories end up inspiring me. i'm aware of the fragility of our planet, so i guess that's on mind Seana Gavin's installation is at b store, 24a Savile Row, London W1S 3PR from 14/10/2011 to 05/11/2011. for more of her work, see seanagavin.blogspot.com