Artists Ways: Louise Ann Wilson, Warnscale

Ramblings

BBC

Nature, Places & Travel, Society & Culture, Science

4.5 • 768 Ratings

🗓️ 17 September 2015

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Clare Balding discovers the essential role walking plays in contemporary artist's work. In this programme she walks with Louise Ann Wilson, a sceneographer, who has created a walking guide and artbook specific to, and created in, Warnscale, an area of fells to the south of Buttermere Lake. Louise explains to Clare that this 9 kilometer walk and the accompanying guide, are aimed at women who are childless by circumstance. Society offers no rituals or rites of passage through which women who have missed the life-event of biological motherhood can be acknowledged and can come to terms with that absence. Louise created this project to offer imaginative and creative ways through which women can engage with landscape to reflect upon and even transform their experience of this circumstance. It provides a multi-layered yet non-prescriptive means for the walker - whether walking alone, with a partner, friend or in a group - to make and perform their own journey, and can also be used by others who are in sympathy with women in this circumstance and persons in comparable situations. They are joined by Zakyeya Atcha, who has undertaken the walk before and found it a consoling and affirming experience and Dr Celia Roberts of Lancaster University

The route can be followed on OS Explorer - The English Lakes North Western Area Grid reference NY 196 150 www.louiseannwilson.com

Producer Lucy Lunt.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This is a BBC Radio 4 download. You're listening to me, Claire Balding, with another edition of ramblings.
0:09.1	Now, when you think or discuss art and the landscape, you think about poets like Wordsworth or Coleridge who have walked miles and miles in the Lake District and then written poems about it, or artists like Constable who study the landscape or Turner with the seascapes
0:25.0	and then created something that is taken away.
0:27.9	But what about art that is totally embedded in its setting?
0:33.7	Well, I've come to the Lake District today to Buttermear.
0:36.4	The lake is behind me, ahead of me, the dark crags of haystacks, and we are going to have an adventure, because
0:42.5	Louise Anne Wilson is a scenographer. Yes, and I make site-specific walking performance.
0:49.2	We're experiencing today a project that I made that's called Warn Scale, a landmark walk.
0:54.7	And that walk reflects on childlessness and fertility stroke infertility.
1:00.0	How did you start on this path?
1:03.8	I trained as a theatre designer and then very quickly started making work not just in theatres,
1:09.2	but I was interested in taking my audience out to the theatre and into real found spaces.
1:14.9	Then I decided to start making walk that looked at difficult, challenging or even missing life events.
1:25.1	And there is a personal starting point to this project.
1:28.4	As I sort of got into my late 30s, I began to realise that, you know, my fertility was diminishing
1:33.5	and yes, I wasn't in a circumstance to begin a family of my own.
1:38.6	It's a missing life event.
1:40.2	It means that you can't become something, a mother, you know, a role you very much desire to have.
1:49.0	There is a feeling of emptiness and isolation and a loneliness.
1:54.1	It's very difficult to talk about it.
1:56.5	So I began to think about making a walk, a like a pilgrimage really that gave me and then others
2:05.9	a space to really dare to face the reality.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.