Louise Ann Wilson
Louise Ann Wilson is an artist, scenographer and researcher who creates site-specific walking-performances in rural, often mountainous, landscape that give-voice to ‘missing’ or marginal life-events – with transformative and therapeutic outcomes. Louise’s practice is located in the field of socially engaged and applied scenography. Scenography literally translates as ‘drawing with the scene’.
In her practice Louise draws walking-performances into and out of a specifically chosen landscape in such a way that seeks to enable participants – individuals, groups and communities – to face, acknowledge and find alternative perspectives on a specific life-event subject matter. She has made work that has addressed terminal illness, death and bereavement, in/fertility, biological childlessness and adoption, the effects of ageing and the impact of change – personal and topographical.
Each project is cross-disciplinary and developed in close collaboration with people with lay and local knowledge of the chosen landscape, scientists and experts in the field of the life-event in question and those experiencing it. These have included: geologists, botanists and shepherds; neurologists, embryologists and palliative care nurses; women experiencing involuntary childlessness, care-home residents and fishermen.
This methodology is underpinned by six ‘scenographic’ principles that are inspired by Dorothy Wordsworth and her female contemporaries approach to walking and landscape and theoretical concepts relating to the feminine ‘material’ sublime and therapeutic landscapes.
In 2017 Louise was awarded a Ph.D. in Theatre Studies from Lancaster Institute of the Contemporary Arts, Lancaster University.