Stevens’ multidisciplinary practice spans visual arts and literature, weaving together fragments of memory, emotion, and embodiment. Their work explores the reconstruction of self through cathartic engagements with past versions of the bodymind, giving shape to internalised experiences of trauma, shame and the duality of selves.
Through playful acts of making, Stevens incorporates elements of spirituality and folly. These motifs recur across their practice, offering both a grounding and a lightness, allowing for vulnerability and absurdity to coexist.
At the heart of Stevens’ creative ethos is a commitment to accessibility and collective care. They believe in the essential role of artistic play in personal and communal wellbeing, and advocate for “arts for all” as a radical, necessary act. Their work often emerges from and returns to community—where art is not a product, but a shared, vital process.
Creating sculptural assemblages from personal detritus, body casts and fabricated elements, Stevens embodies past versions of themselves, creating corpse-like static cathartic reflections of complex bodymind traumas. Key points of meditation in the work include substance abuse, the passing of relationships, and mental and physical illness. The artist draws comparisons between rituals, fooling, the sacred, the everyday, and iconography. These objects or relics, that act as souvenirs that hold memories of personal histories, are often mutated and mummified to express the horror and surreality of traumatic events and the complexity of emotional turmoil upon reflection of one's own 'bad' behaviours.
“Adults and children sometimes have boards in their bedrooms or living rooms on which they pin pieces of paper: letters, snapshots, reproductions of paintings, newspaper cuttings, original drawings, postcards. On each board all the images belong to the same language and all are more or less equal within it, because they have been chosen in a highly personal way to match and express the experience of the room’s inhabitant. Logically, these boards should replace museums.”
- Ways of Seeing (1972) by John Berger
Bogus Catharsis ✞
Piaculum 𝜋
Piaculum: A Short Pie Story (2025) by Anna Stevens
Adrian hated his life. He hated his flat. His overtly familiar commute. His inconsistent parents. His absent friends. His lacklustre love life. But the thing he hated the most, beyond compare, was his job. It sucked away every bit of goodness, every tint of colour, sapped all his energy, from every other aspect of his existence. His life was grey. His life was pie.