Dave McKean: what I'm working on – in pictures

I tend to work on several projects at the same time, some personal, some commissioned. At the moment I’m illustrating and designing several books, finishing the effects sequences and sound for a feature film, adapting a comic story into an animated short film, writing songs for an audio/visual performance, creating illustrations for a new CD by Roy Harper and a film version of Matthew Bourne’s Sleeping Beauty, creating new work for various exhibitions in the second half of this year, and starting to plan a new feature film based on a site specific theatrical event by WildWorks. As different as these projects are, imagery and obsessions bleed between them. The interactive narrative exhibition I made in 2011, The Rut, was at the Pumphouse Gallery in Battersea, which is built on the site of an old deer park – unleashing a host of images which have seeped into everything I'm working on at the moment Photograph: Dave McKean

The Rut started with a story from my childhood and headed off to explore the animal nature of humanity. The story fragmented in the room, making it unclear exactly where the truth lay, reflecting my own obsession with the alternate possible outcomes of this moment in time. It's due to be published in book form, as part of a collection of narrative exhibition stories Photograph: Dave McKean

Similar imagery appears in a newly illustrated edition of Neil Gaiman’s collection of short stories Smoke and Mirrors. In among Neil's stories of old Hollywood, trolls and disquieting sex was a story in which my deer/human characters seemed appropriate Photograph: Dave McKean

I live in the country, and I’ve been fascinated by local groups of folk performers, whose ragged coats, blackened faces and antler adornments connect them with the landscape, the wildlife, the history and the myths of Kent. I’ve been creating my own tribe of mythic figures in these photographs for an exhibition and book called Pholk Photograph: Dave McKean

I’ve done three books with David Almond now. Our latest is called Mouse Bird Snake Wolf and takes place in a world created by lazy gods whose incomplete landscape begs to be filled with the overreaching creativity of three children. They start with a mouse, but run into problems when they get as far as a wolf ... Photograph: Dave McKean

Primal figures personifying the science of astronomy and myths of astrology thread through the new book I have illustrated for SF Said, Phoenix Photograph: Dave McKean

Transformation, English history and storytelling are at the heart of my new book with Heston Blumenthal. Taking old English recipes, Historic Heston recreates them for the 21st century. My observations of Kent folk traditions feed into this image for the recipe ‘Wassailing’ Photograph: Dave McKean

The feature film I’m finishing is called Luna. The life of a baby who died after only a day is lived out in a series of strange dreams and hallucinations during a long weekend in an isolated house on the Devon coast. Emotions are released in the woods, the child appears to be a character from the children’s fairy stories illustrated by one of the men in the film. Animal/human transformation again ... Photograph: Dave McKean

Roy Harper’s new CD deals with man and myth, so he morphed into one of my characters. This portrait is just one of the images we’re playing with at the moment for the packaging, trying to create something that mirrors the songs he’s writing Photograph: Dave McKean

I spent some time in a friend’s wood, and wrote a story called Blue Tree, a root ball of such complexity that it becomes a neural net, growing out into the world, exploring the planet and our place on it, trying to understand our behaviour as an entirely different, but equally complex organism might. The story became another narrative exhibition that tried to bring together my feelings from two previous life-changing projects: a year turning Michael Sheen’s Passion play into a film, The Gospel of Us, and the year before working with Richard Dawkins on his introduction to critical thinking and science for children (and anybody really) The Magic of Reality Photograph: Dave McKean

And bringing everything together – the groundbreaking Cornish theatre company who helped make The Gospel of Us, WildWorks, are putting together a site specific theatrical event which I hope to shoot as a film next year. It’s about revealed knowledge in the woods, taking in fairy story traditions, the myth of Callisto, and the animal nature of ourselves. Here are a couple of photos taken during their R&D week, ‘growing’ the show from workshops and improvisations Photograph: Dave McKean