Yiann Stevens Cegarra

Yiann Stevens Cegarra is a lens-based artist living in Aberdeen, Scotland. Her work is focused through the fervours of folklore of Scotland and beyond. She finds inspirations from tales of distant past where people drew a mythical understanding of nature. Through her image-making, she seeks that lost bond which connects us all to the mother of all beings. She loves being near water and finds it to be the portal she can cross to find contemplation, a place where she can be free in the mind and a place to belong.

In her most recent work, River Tales, Stevens finds her way in through the Scottish landscape by following rivers from source to sea while learning to return to a more intimate relationship with nature sustained through stories related to places. Tales like Farquharson of the Wand proved fascinating, as is the river at the Linn of Dee. Rivers show abundant with tales related to it, like The Kelpie Tale, The Lass from the Sea and many others, which have their counterparts across cultures. The importance, of such tales serves as a response to the area, for which Stevens can be seen as an ‘other’ who finds a factor to relate to the landscape that has influenced these tales and to which she feels she belongs.

River Tales transcended into a personal journey of discovery: of how the river landscape could be seen as a metaphor for a spiritual interpretation of human life and the flow of water as a metaphor for our journey through life, much confirming this deeper meaning between rivers and human life experiences. A glimpse can be seen of the state of mind experienced by Stevens through her journeys, during which she created her own responses, her own tales.