Louise Ann Wilson is an artist and performance-maker working in site-specific art and walking-performance. She creates walking-performances, immersive installations, and books that give voice to ‘missing’ or marginal life-events, with transformative outcomes. Her works have addressed terminal illness, death and bereavement, in/fertility and involuntary childlessness, the effects of ageing, immobility, and the impact of personal and topographical change.
Her practice is developed through an extended period of immersion in chosen landscapes, using three tiers of cross-disciplinary research: into the site, the subject matter, and related biological and social sciences, alongside collaboration with participants experiencing the life-events in question. Her collaborators have included geologists, botanists, shepherds, neurologists, embryologists, palliative care nurses, women living with involuntary childlessness, care-home residents, fishermen, and the bereaved. She also works with choreographers, poets, and composers.
Wilson has developed and applies Seven Scenographic Principles, based on the concept of the feminine ‘material sublime,’ inspired by her close study of Dorothy Wordsworth and her female contemporaries’ approaches to engaging with landscape.
Her works range in scale from intimate one-to-one Walks to Remember (2018–21) and the self-guided performance-walk Warnscale (2015), recognised by ACE as “outstanding,” to large-scale performances such as Fissure (2011), a three-day pilgrimage in the Yorkshire Dales responding to the death of her sister, and The Gathering (2014) on Mt. Snowdon for National Theatre Wales, created with shepherds, sheep, dogs, a brass band, and local schools.
Recent projects extend this exploration into her own lived experiences of hysterectomy, surgical menopause, and breast cancer. In 2021 she created Quarried Body, a film made in Lake District slate quarries that interweaves medical imagery with landscape, alongside Walking the Menopause, a series of solo, one-to-one, and group walks supporting women to map and walk their own menopausal experiences. Following a breast cancer diagnosis in 2023, and after undergoing multiple surgeries including a mastectomy with reconstruction, she created Becoming Rock. This work emplaces her body within carboniferous limestone landscapes such as Farleton Knott, where fissured rock formations resonated with the calcifications revealed by her mammogram.
In addition to performance, Wilson regularly exhibits her practice and research, curating her site-specific landscape works into galleries as installations that distil objects, sound, film, and performance. She frequently presents at conferences and symposia, and her work is featured in the press, media, and on radio.
In 2017, she was awarded a Ph.D. in Theatre Studies from Lancaster Institute of the Contemporary Arts, Lancaster University. She has over thirty years of experience teaching in Higher Education as a visiting and associate lecturer at undergraduate and postgraduate level, and she is regularly invited to give guest lectures and presentations on her practice and research.
Her book, Sites of Transformation: Applied and Socially Engaged Scenography in Rural Landscapes (Bloomsbury 2022), was shortlisted for the prestigious PQ Best Book Award 2023.
