Ramblings

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