22 Jul Spiralled
Seana Gavin
“…there were moments during the weekend that felt magical, full of natural euphoria. Wanted to feel like that forever. Now we’re outside Prague trying to find a camp site.” Seana Gavin’s SPIRALLED – a strong contender for coolest book of the summer – is full of moments like this, where the surreal and sublime sits side-by-side with the earthy and ordinary. A dreamy double-exposure of sunbathers on a golden beach sits opposite a shot of a concrete underpass littered with trash. Such is life. At the tail end of the 90s into the early 2000s, Seana Gavin was part of the rave scene, travelling around in a giant truck accompanied by a sound system and a vast, ever-changing community of like-minded nomadic party animals, defying the commercialisation of club culture in the UK by holding free and illegal parties across Europe. Using cheap disposable cameras at first, and later a real 35mm, Gavin documented the everyday reality of the rave scene. What emerges is a chronicle of a life made up entirely of endings and beginnings, or so it seems, as the convoy moves from place to place, from party to party. People appear and disappear. What is depicted is both beautiful and transient. As Seana says, “It was a product of its time, and something that will never be repeated in quite the same way again. And that’s what makes it precious.”