Dorothy’s Room is an immersive installation inspired by Dorothy Wordsworth’s Rydal Journals in which she describes “rural sights and sounds” in vivid detail: “blue primroses of Alpine purple”; the Robin who became a “singing companion”; “…hail, wind, rain, snow – Oyster Feast”; “bright gleams & startling flashes of sunshine”; hazy bulky mountains among slanting rays of the sun…”

Due, however, to illness, Dorothy became largely confined to her bedroom, relying on memory to transport herself into the landscape she had once walked.
 Her multi-sensory remembering and noticing of the ‘natural’ world enabled her to access the world around her and the past in an immediate and direct way that was therapeutic – a healing process that brought joy and calm and kept her from the “wilderness of her mind”: 

No need of motion, or of strength, Or even the breathing air: –
I thought of Nature's loveliest scenes; And with Memory I was there…

Extract from the poem “Thoughts on my Sick-Bed” by Dorothy Wordsworth.

Dorothy also brought “treasures” into her “quiet” room. The walls were hung with paintings, pots of flowers lined her window ledge, plants grew around her window, which framed the fells she once walked, sunshine and the “sweet sound” of a robin singing entered from the garden.

The installation centres on Dorothy’s sick bed. Objects mentioned in her Rydal Journals nest amid twisted and disordered bed linen stitched with extracts of the later entries including a working-draft of part of her poem, ‘Thoughts from my Sick Bed’. The film brings the walks and landscapes described in Dorothy's journals into the gallery. Drawing on footage recorded whilst re-walking Dorothy's routes, alongside walks that present-day women can no longer undertake, it reflects Dorothy's memories, longings and enduring relationship with the landscape.

Dorothy's Room premiered at Rydal Mount, Ambleside, before touring to The Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere, and later to the Peter Scott Gallery, Lancaster.

I went to see your video installation in the Scott Gallery - how well the spirit of your work simply shone out from it. There was a moment when lit water in the projections fell across the pillow which was so eloquent you hardly needed written exposition. Memorable. 

Visitor, Peter Scott Gallery

Dorothy's Room formed the starting point for later walking works, including Women's Walks to Remember: "With Memory I Was There". Inspired by Dorothy Wordsworth's use of memory to return to landscapes she could no longer walk, I invited women to share memory-maps of walks they themselves could no longer undertake. I then re-walked each remembered route, returning with 'treasures'—film, sound, words, objects and maps—which were distilled into a multi-layered memory book for each participant.