Sites of Transformation: Applied and Socially Engaged Scenography in Rural Landscapes

Author: Louise Ann Wilson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2022.

Available in hardback, paperback and ebook from Bloomsbury and major academic booksellers. 

Sites of Transformation introduces the concept and practice of socially engaged and applied scenography through a body of site-specific walking performances created across the UK over more than a decade. Situtated at the intersection of landscape, performance and lived experience, the book explores how creative practice can help people engage with challenging life events by emplacing those experiences within particular landscapes. 

The book brings together over two decades of my artistic practice and research, combining critical reflection with detailed case studies drawn from site-specific projects developed in mountains, caves, along coastlines and across rural landscapes. These include Fissure, Ghost Bird, The Gathering, Warnscale, Mulliontide, Dorothy's Room and Women's Walks to Remember. Together, they combine creative documentation with participants' experiences to explore the transformative potential of walking, place and performance.

The book introduces the creative methodology that underpins my practice, including the Seven Scenographic Principles, developed through long-term research into landscape, walking, performance and socially engaged practice, underpinned by the walking practice and writing of Dorothy Wordsworth.

Sites of Transformation: Applied and Socially Engaged Scenography in Rural Landscapes was shortlisted for the Prague Quadrennial (PQ) Best Publication Award in Performance Design & Scenography 2023, recognising its contribution to contemporary scenography research and practice. It was shortlisted alongside leading international publications in performance design and scenography.

The book was also featured by Wild Women Press in Thread 42: Sites of Transformation, introducing the publication and discussing its relationship to walking, landscape, scenography and socially engaged practice. The feature also explored projects including Warnscale and Women's Walks to Remember.

Cover image: Fissure (2011). Dancer: Jennifer Essex. Choreographer: Nigel Stewart. Photographer: Bethany Clarke / Artevents.

In Sites of Transformation artist-scholar Louise Ann Wilson introduces us to the innovative concept and practice of socially engaged and applied scenography, walking us through her scenographic-led work. In a highly original triangulation of place (from mountains, to beaches, to caves), challenging life-event (from bereavement, to involuntary childlessness, to immobility), and participant, Louise reveals the ways in which ‘sited’ scenography can foster powerful and transformative acts of re-imaging and reimagining. This scenography with purpose is rigorously thoughtful and creative, emplacing hope in difficult times.

Professor Deirdre Heddon
University of Glasgow

Mulliontide: A Guide for Walkers

Author and designer: Louise Ann Wilson
Publisher: Louise Ann Wilson Company, 2017

Mulliontide is an artist's walking guide developed from a coastal walking project created with residents of Mullion, Cornwall. Following a route from Poldhu Cove to Mullion Cove, it explores the relationships between tide, time, memory and place through a series of fifteen stopping points.

Combining photography, conversations, songs and walking instructions, the guide introduces readers to local people and their connections with this changing stretch of coastline. While designed to accompany the walk itself, it also stands alone as an artist's publication documenting the project and inviting readers to experience the landscape wherever they are. 

Limited copies are still available. Please contact Louise Ann Wilson if you would like to purchase a copy.

Warnscale: A Land Mark Walk Reflecting on In/Fertility and Childlessness

Author and designer: Louise Ann Wilson
Publisher: Louise Ann Wilson Company, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9932664-0-9

Warnscale is an artist's book created alongside the site-specific walking performance of the same name. Developed through long-term research with women experiencing involuntary childlessness, fertility specialists and local communities around Buttermere in the Lake District, it explores how landscape can become a place for reflection, acknowledgement and transformation.

Designed as both an artist's publication and a practical walking guide, the book enables readers to undertake the walk independently, either alone or with others. Structured around the four phases of the moon, it guides walkers through thirteen carefully chosen landmarks, each combining landscape, geology, photography, drawing, archival material, reflective writing and invitations to pause, observe and walk attentively.

Drawing on Dorothy Wordsworth's journals alongside original photographs, drawings and texts, the publication invites readers to experience the landscape through multiple perspectives while creating space to reflect on absence, change, memory and personal experience. A geology hand lens accompanies the limited edition, encouraging close observation of the physical landscape as part of the walking experience.

Rather than documenting the performance alone, Warnscale extends it beyond the original event, allowing new walkers to engage with the work in their own time and at their own pace. It functions simultaneously as an artist's book, a walking guide and an invitation to experience landscape as a place of contemplation and transformation.

Ultimately, Warnscale invites readers to find a place for quiet reflection, to experience the elemental forces of the landscape around and within, and to consider how walking can open new ways of seeing, feeling and understanding.

Limited copies are still available. Please contact Louise Ann Wilson if you would like to purchase a copy.

Reader & Participant Reflections

 

The book is beautifully done, engaging on lots of levels, one page can be a stimulus for reflection or discussion in its own right. For me the walk could have been anywhere-the landscape in the lake district is amazing but really its the process of walking and the space to talk. Maybe being in the mountains is comforting as what we say gets taken in by them and away with the wind.

 

The book is very well designed and laid out with the blend of photographs and drawings fascinating and atmospheric. The moon cut out makes the whole thing a very satisfying and inspiring work of art to go back to and to dip in and out of sections. 

 

I think the book strikes a powerful balance between presenting information and ideas and allowing space for the reader to make their own connections.  The way it is organised means there is both a freedom and a guiding structure.

 

Whilst some of the responses were not part of my experience of childlessness, the barrenness of the landscape and beauty and timelessness helped me recognise that my grieving and pain would pass in time. I have already begun to flourish. 

 

I just wanted to drop you a quick note to say thank you so much for an amazing day last Saturday. [...] as you said, it’s not about attaining the peak, but immersion in the experience. And it was a beautiful and moving experience... It also allowed me to look at my own experience afresh and to take a great deal of comfort from the reading and rituals. I spent the train journey home reading you book which, having worked in publishing for 20 years now, I have to say is impressive on all levels: conception, organization, content and design. 

 

 

I have just opened your beautiful book - it is stunning. I have never seen the subject of infertility demonstrated in such a moving and graphic way.

Wanda Georgiades, CARE Fertility Group.