Mabinogi Monday #5 with Peter Stevenson

Storytelling with Michael Harvey

Peter Stevenson has been a major catalyst in the revival of creative interest in the Mabinogi over the last few years, particularly with the two Mabinogi based festivals he organised in Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Y Mabinogi in 2015 and Y Bumed Gainc in 2017. It wasn’t just the artwork, storytelling and music he curated but the people as well. Visual artists, academics, storytellers, storylovers and musicians mixed, mingled and laughed in a great bubbling cauldron of contemporary creativity.

Peter Stevenson

As you can imagine I was really keen to have a chat with him about what the Mabinogi meant to him and we met in his studio, which he shares with other artists, in a former billiard hall that is, literally, behind a secret door in the centre of Aberystwyth. Some of his work is included below.

In these conversation we talked about…

• the connection between images and memory and images and words
• a formative experiences of communal and shared creativity
• the range of storytelling from individual folk-tales to the Mabinogi
• live drawing with storytelling
• stories in a wider weave of landscape and community
• the relationship of dream, memory and events and the fragility of chronology
• using folktale, myth and other orally derived material to see the world more clearly

Peter is also a hugely experienced and much-published illustrator and author of the book Welsh Folk Tales published by the History Press. In the interview we also mention visual artist Maria Hayes and harpist Harriet Earis.

Don’t forget to have a listen to the ‘extra’ recording where