What happens when you stop trying to define your creative path and instead follow the things that continue to hold your attention?
In this episode of Extraordinary Creatives, I’m joined by sisters Francesca Gavin and Seana Gavin, two creative voices working in different disciplines but connected by a shared belief in curiosity, instinct and the importance of staying close to what feels alive.
Francesca has spent her career shaping conversations around contemporary art and visual culture. As Director of Visual Arts at Murmur, Editor-in-Chief of EPOCH, art editor at Twin, and a regular contributor to publications including the Financial Times, she has become one of the most influential writers, editors and curators working in the field today. Her practice moves fluidly between criticism, publishing, broadcasting and exhibition-making, reflecting a deep curiosity about the connections between different forms of creativity.
Over the years, Francesca has curated projects internationally, including co-curating Manifesta 11 in Zurich and exhibitions at institutions such as Somerset House and the Palais de Tokyo. She is the author of eleven books exploring art and visual culture, and for the past nine years has hosted Rough Version on NTS Radio, a platform that explores the relationships between art, music and wider cultural movements.
Seana’s creative journey has taken a different form. Working primarily through collage, she creates dreamlike worlds from vintage photographic material, bringing together fragments of the past to imagine new possibilities. Her work explores memory, transformation and the strange connections that emerge when different moments in time are placed alongside each other.
Her practice has been exhibited internationally, including at Somerset House, the Serralves Foundation and the Nobel Prize Museum in Stockholm, alongside solo exhibitions in Paris and London. Her work has appeared across publications, collaborations and permanent collections, including Soho House worldwide, while her photography monograph Spiralled, published by IDEA Books, has now reached its fourth edition.
Although their practices look very different, both Francesca and Seana share an approach to creativity built around paying attention. They both describe creative lives that have developed through following curiosity rather than following a fixed plan — allowing ideas, interests and obsessions to reveal their own importance over time.
In this conversation, we explore what it means to sustain a creative practice over decades, how different forms of work can feed into each other, and why artists and creatives often need to trust the things they return to repeatedly. We talk about the importance of making space for experimentation, the value of accessibility, and how clarity can sometimes be a sign of deeper understanding rather than simplicity.
We also explore the relationship between confidence and recognition. How seeing potential in someone else’s work can change the way they see themselves, and how creative communities are often built through encouragement, generosity and people willing to pay attention before the wider world does.
Ultimately, this is a conversation about staying open. About allowing your practice to evolve, embracing different creative identities, and recognising that the things that continue to fascinate us may be pointing towards the work we are here to make.
What We Learned from Francesca Gavin and Seana Gavin
What stays with me most from this conversation is the importance of trusting what keeps calling you back.
There is so much pressure within creative culture to define yourself quickly. To find the perfect description of what you do, establish a recognisable identity and create a clear path that others can understand. But Francesca and Seana’s stories suggest something much more fluid.
Their creative lives have developed through attention. Through following questions, ideas and interests that may not have seemed connected at first, but gradually revealed their own relationships. A radio show leads into conversations about music and culture. Writing leads into curating. Old photographs become new worlds. Different strands of creativity begin to speak to each other.
I was particularly struck by their understanding of sustainability. Not simply as a question of continuing to produce work, but as an ability to remain connected to curiosity over time. A long creative life is not built by constantly chasing what is new. It is built by understanding what genuinely matters to you and creating the conditions to keep exploring it.
There is also a generosity at the heart of this conversation. Both Francesca and Seana understand that creative confidence does not always appear from within. Sometimes it comes through relationships, conversations and moments when someone else recognises something in us before we fully recognise it ourselves.
In a world where creativity can sometimes feel complicated by the pressure to appear original, intellectual or strategically positioned, there is something refreshing about their belief in instinct. About allowing work to be driven by fascination rather than simply by expectation.
Perhaps the invitation from this conversation is to pay closer attention to the things you cannot quite let go of. The subjects you keep returning to. The ideas that continue appearing. The materials, questions or experiences that refuse to disappear.
They may not be distractions from your creative practice.
They may be the beginning of it.
Thank you for listening.
