writing-teaching--talks
Participatory, site-specific workshops that use walking, drawing, mapping and other creative methods to explore landscape, lived experience and the themes underpinning my artistic and research practice.
Invited keynote lectures, conference papers, public talks and workshops exploring walking-performance, scenography, landscape, health and creative practice.
Interviews, podcasts, broadcasts and invited online features exploring Louise Ann Wilson's creative practice, research and site-specific projects.
Commissioned chapters combining practice-led research, creative writing and critical reflection on landscape, walking, performance and materiality.
RiverRock is a series of performative and drawing-based explorations centred on a single rock within Crom Allt Burn. Through touch, paper and drawing, the work investigates how sustained attention and physical engagement might reveal the material qualities of stone.
SnowBody is a series of performative explorations developed in the winter landscape surrounding Crom Allt Burn, Tyndrum. Through photography and drawing, the work investigates the relationship between body, snow, water and landscape, forming part of Louise Ann Wilson's wider enquiry into Becoming Rock.
Pigment: A Mountain Walk in Forty Colours is an ongoing practice-led research and creative project exploring how pigment might become a way of understanding mountain, geology, walking and place. Developed in response to an invitation to contribute a chapter to a forthcoming publication on mountains and objects, the project takes pigment as both its material and conceptual focus, allowing creative practice to become the research itself.
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Books and artist's publications exploring landscape, walking, performance, memory and practice-led research.
In July 2023, I was diagnosed with pre-invasive breast cancer (Ductal carcinoma in situ, or DCIS). This diagnosis led to a series of surgeries that took place over a six month period. Throughout this period, in the body of work Becoming Rock, I have used photography, film and drawing to document my experience and emplaced (and photographed) my body in various landscape sites chosen for their physical, psychological and metaphorical resonance.
Peer-reviewed journal articles and monograph publications exploring landscape, walking, performance, health, memory and practice-led research.
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In 2016, Louise Ann Wilson was awarded a PhD in Theatre Studies from the Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts, Lancaster University. Her doctoral research combined a written thesis with original creative practice, developing approaches to socially engaged scenography in rural landscapes.
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A research framework for creating socially engaged and applied scenography through walking-performance in rural and mountainous landscapes, developed through practice-led research and informed by the feminine 'material' sublime
Exhibitions, installations and gallery-based presentations of practice-led research, walking-performance, photography, film and drawing.
Walking the Menopause developed from my own experience of surgical menopause and has grown into a series of site-specific menopause walks across Cumbria, Lancashire and Yorkshire. Through walking, conversation and creative mapping, the project explores how menopause is experienced, remembered and understood through landscape.
The Quarried Body (2021–2025) is a body of work exploring radical hysterectomy, surgical menopause and recovery through photography, drawing, printmaking and site-specific performance. Bringing together documentary and scenographic images with medical materials, the work examines relationships between surgery, excavation and landscape.
Tell it to the Bees is a honeybee-inspired walking performance created for Exeter city centre. Beginning at the beehives on the roof of Princesshay Shopping Centre, participants are introduced to the age-old practice of telling the bees their troubles and hopes before being guided on a walk through the city. Through words, music, film and performative actions, the work explores relationships between honeybees, ritual, memory, illness, care and recovery in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Walks to Remember During a Pandemic: 'With Memory I Was There' is a participatory walking project initiated during the spring and summer Covid-19 lockdown of 2020. Inviting people to create memory-maps of walks they could no longer physically undertake, the project grew into an archive of remembered landscapes, personal stories and shared experiences of isolation, longing and place..
Lockdown in Lancaster & Morecambe: Walk, Run, Pedal, Push – Map records the paths and places that participating residents of Lancaster and Morecambe visited during the Covid-19 lockdown in spring–summer 2020. Together these routes reveal the landscapes that offered breathing space — mentally, emotionally and physically — during a period of restricted movement.
Dorothy's Room is an immersive installation created in Dorothy Wordsworth’s bedroom at Rydal Mount in Ambleside, Cumbria and inspired by Dorothy Wordworth's Rydal Journals in which she was bed-bound relying on memory to transport herself into the landscape she had once walked. Dorothy's Room is a companion project to Women's Walks to Remember: 'With Memory I was there.'
Women’s Walks to Remember: 'With Memory I was there' is a surrogate walking-art project in which I re-walk significant walks that women are no longer able to undertake. These remembered walks may have been associated with work, leisure, adventure, health, remembrance, creativity, science, companionship or solitude. They may no longer be possible because of ageing, illness, accident or changing circumstances.
Harold's Walk: A Walk to Remember developed from Mulliontide (2016), when conversations with care home resident Harold Potter led me to re-walk one of his remembered Cumbrian walks. That first surrogate walk became the starting point for the later Walks to Remember series, exploring memory, landscape and walking on behalf of others.
Remembrance: Returning, We Hear The Larks is a site-specific performance-installation created with Lancaster Priory and its congregation to mark the centenary of the end of the First World War. It opened as part of Light Up Lancaster 2018 Light Up Lancaster 2018 and continued throughout the following week as part of Remembrance Weekend and The Battle's Over, marking the end of hostilities on 11 November 1918.
Mulliontide is a coastal walking-performance from Poldhu Cove to Mullion Cove in Cornwall. Focusing on a much-loved landscape, it explores the places where land, sea and people meet, recognising the effects of tide and time and acknowledging deep feelings for place and the challenges of personal and topographical change.
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Warnscale: A Landmark Walk Reflecting on In/Fertility and Childlessness is a self-guided walking artwork set in the Warnscale Fells above Buttermere. Through walking, writing and site-responsive interventions, it reflects on childlessness-by-circumstance, landscape, absence and belonging, inviting walkers to experience the fells as places of contemplation, remembrance and renewal.
The Gathering / Yr Helfa is a site-specific walking performance created in collaboration with Hafod y Llan Farm in Snowdonia. Inspired by the annual sheep gather, it reveals the day-to-day and seasonal workings of the farm while exploring cycles of fertility, reproduction, work and landscape. The performance took 200 participants on a six-kilometre circular journey through the landscape and into the farm, where they encountered installations, performance, film, poetry, music, sound and everyday farming activities.
Fissure is a three-day site-specific walking performance in the Yorkshire Dales. Eighty participants make a journey by train and on foot, following a twenty-mile route that circumnavigates, descends beneath, and finally ascends Ingleborough. Along the way they encounter poetry by Elizabeth Burns set to music by Jocelyn Pook, dance choreographed by Nigel Stewart, and a series of creative and scientific interventions in a shared exploration of life, death, grief and renewal.
Ghost Bird is a silent walking performance and live-art installation created for the Langden Valley in the Trough of Bowland, Lancashire, an upland landscape internationally important for its heather moorland, blanket bog and rare birds. Referring to the ghostly grey feathers of the increasingly persecuted male hen harrier, the work reflects on absence, loss and persecution, drawing connections with the journey made over the Bowland Fells to Lancaster Castle by the "Pendle Witches" over 400 years earlier.
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Jack Scout (17 - 26 Sept 2010) was a walking-performance specific to Jack Scout, an intimate location in Silverdale, Lancashire, of bewitching beauty and extraordinary aesthetic, cultural and scientific value overlooking the vast sands and tides of Morecambe Bay.
Still Life is an intertidal performance created for the sands of Morecambe Bay and the shoreline at Far Arnside, Lancashire. Co-produced by Sap Dance and Louise Ann Wilson Company, it explores how we frame nature and what lies beyond the frame through walking, installation, movement and the changing conditions of the intertidal landscape.