Louise Ann Wilson is a transdisciplinary scenographer, performance maker and researcher. She is the Artistic Director of the Louise Ann Wilson Company and a visiting lecturer at several UK universities.
Louise creates site-specific walking-performances, immersive installations and books that give-voice to ‘missing’ or marginal life-events – with transformative and outcomes. Works have addressed terminal illness, bereavement, in/fertility and involuntary childlessness, the effects of ageing and the impact of change. They are developed in close collaboration with experts from fields not usually associated with the arts, and people with lay and local knowledge of the site. They are made through an extended period of immersion in a chosen landscape using three tiers of cross-disciplinary research into the site, the subject matter and related science (biological and social) and with participants who are themselves experiencing the effects of the underlying subject matter. These have included geologists, botanists and shepherds, neurologists, embryologists and palliative care nurses, women experiencing involuntary childlessness, care-home residents and fishermen.
She had developed and applies 'Seven Scenographic Principles' based on the concept of the feminine 'material' sublime developed through a close study of Dorothy Wordsworth and her female comtemporaries approach to, and way, of engaging with landscape.
In 2017 Louise was awarded a Ph.D. in Theatre Studies from Lancaster Institute of the Contemporary Arts, Lancaster University.
She regularly exhibits her practice and research, often curating my site-specific landscape-performances into galleries where objects, sound, film and performance elements are distilled into installations, and present at a conferences and symposiums as well as in the press, media and on radio broadcasts. She works as a visiting lecturer at a number of UK universities.
She has over thirty years experience as a visiting and associate lecturer in Higher Education at undergraduate and postgraduate level, and is regularly invited as a guest lecturer to give talks and presentations on her practice and research. She is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (HEA), holds a number of teaching qualifications including the Supporting Learning Programme (SLP), and was an External Examiner for the BA Performance Design and Practice Central St Martin’s, UAL, London (2014-18).
