Louise Ann Wilson
1993 LINBURY PRIZE FINALIST
Selected Portfolio
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"Being selected for and taking part in the Linbury Prize gave me self belief and confidence in my abilities as a young designer which in turn helped me step in the my career as a scenographer, performance maker and director."
Louise Ann Wilson, Designer
Louise is an artist, scenographer and researcher who creates site-specific walking-performances, films, installations and book that give-voice to ‘missing’ or marginal life-events – with transformative and therapeutic outcomes. Her work has addressed terminal illness, bereavement, in/fertility and involuntary childlessness, the effects of aging and the impact of change.
Current projects include: Women’s Walks to Remember: ‘With Memory I was there’, which celebrates the walking-lives of Lake District women and collects significant walks that can no longer be walked and Dorothy’s Room, an immersive installation inspired by Dorothy’s Rydal Journals in which she was bed-bound relying on memory to transport herself into the Cumbrian landscape she had once walked.
Both projects are exhibited at The Wordsworth Trust Museum, Grasmere until 20 December 2018.
Louise's projects 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 also applies six scenographic principles based on the concept of the feminine (material) sublime and 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 work and present her practice and research 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.