Dystopian cityscapes, giant toadstools, lush waterfalls and prehistoric life-forms. Looking at one of Seana Gavin’s collages is like tumbling down the rabbit hole. And ending up in a ‘70s sci-fi movie. By hand-cutting and pasting images she finds in vintage nature books and stacks of yellow National Geographics, the London-based artist creates fantasy landscapes that are by turns surreal, disturbing and dream-like but always unapologetically psychedelic. 

Gavin’s trippy style might have something to do with growing up in Woodstock, New York. ‘At school there were a lot of people called Star and Rainbow. It was a tiny town full of creative people and hippies who came in ‘69 and never left.’ She moved back to London aged 12 and after art school at Chelsea and Camberwell, started experimenting with collage. ‘I was always interested in the layering of ripped posters you see on street walls or the underground. I liked the way a new image sometimes appeared from the layering process – like a figure or an eye poking out combined with abstract shapes. This led me to think more about paper as a medium and I started experimenting with scrapbooks of images and postcards which I’d been collecting for years.’

Seana Gavin looks far younger than her ‘30-ish’ years, in a green silk shirt from Urban Outfitters, a knitted Jaeger bomber jacket and box-fresh Nike Airs. Last autumn she collaborated on a womenswear collection with Japanese designer Mihara Yasuhiro and was chosen as part of the Soho House collection, exhibiting her work alongside Tracey Emin and Peter Blake in Soho and Miami.

Gavin plays with perspective, scale and images breaking out of their borders to make you feel like you’re diving into the world. ‘I want people viewing my work to feel like they’re lost in this alternative environment and have a moment of escapism from their regular lives.’ For her next project Seana’s thinking big. ‘I’d like to do a large-scale 3D set of some kind. I want to see how my landscapes would look with a life-size human being in the mix.’ Well, if she needs a volunteer...