Warnscale
Warnscale: a land mark walk
Louise Ann Wilson
(Leeds: Louise Ann Wilson Company, 2015)
This book is a map, a walking guide, a geological object, a handbook, and a therapy. It is a multi-layered and deeply sensitive exploration of feelings in landscape. It does not shy away from the picturesque of its landscape, fells close by Buttermere Lake in the Lake District, but rather it turns the concept and its physical emergences into frames for scaling up and scaling down, as the book’s own images (like the holes that run physically its paper) open up vistas and then focus down to the textures of lichen and the inner walls of the female body.
Warnscale has been created by Louise Ann Wilson while walking repeatedly with women who have shared her experienced of being 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 come to terms with that absence”. But this book offers exactly that. It creates a ritual in the form a walk in four lunar phases. Navigating by thirteen landmarks the user of this multiplicitous guide – riven itself, one page dropping through into another, unveiling a vista or a texture, an almost impossibly sharp wall of jewel-grey volcanic rocks or a shocking pink-stained sheep – is invited to perform simple actions (but deeply challenging: “experience the elemental force around and within”) that curl extracts from Dorothy Wordsworth’s ambulatory reflections in the early 1800s back into the contemporary walking body.
Wilson recounts how she heard shepherds describe ewes that had not become pregnant while with the ram as “empty”. Without ever denying melancholy or feelings of marginalisation and painful passing of time and possibility, this book challenges that void and evokes the gentle richness of strata and the flat hardness of mountains, and takes you to a tarn that while “scarce in nutrients” can still support Keratella, Eunotia and Frustrulia (with illustration as beautiful as their names) and invites you there to “take your boots and socks off... feel the sensation and temperature of the water”. It fills the reader, and points the walker to eyes full of colours, fine touches and vantage points and sharply precarious piles of stones; it is rich and generous but it never denies that “fertility is cruel”.
Crab Man
Louise Ann Wilson
(Leeds: Louise Ann Wilson Company, 2015)
This book is a map, a walking guide, a geological object, a handbook, and a therapy. It is a multi-layered and deeply sensitive exploration of feelings in landscape. It does not shy away from the picturesque of its landscape, fells close by Buttermere Lake in the Lake District, but rather it turns the concept and its physical emergences into frames for scaling up and scaling down, as the book’s own images (like the holes that run physically its paper) open up vistas and then focus down to the textures of lichen and the inner walls of the female body.
Warnscale has been created by Louise Ann Wilson while walking repeatedly with women who have shared her experienced of being 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 come to terms with that absence”. But this book offers exactly that. It creates a ritual in the form a walk in four lunar phases. Navigating by thirteen landmarks the user of this multiplicitous guide – riven itself, one page dropping through into another, unveiling a vista or a texture, an almost impossibly sharp wall of jewel-grey volcanic rocks or a shocking pink-stained sheep – is invited to perform simple actions (but deeply challenging: “experience the elemental force around and within”) that curl extracts from Dorothy Wordsworth’s ambulatory reflections in the early 1800s back into the contemporary walking body.
Wilson recounts how she heard shepherds describe ewes that had not become pregnant while with the ram as “empty”. Without ever denying melancholy or feelings of marginalisation and painful passing of time and possibility, this book challenges that void and evokes the gentle richness of strata and the flat hardness of mountains, and takes you to a tarn that while “scarce in nutrients” can still support Keratella, Eunotia and Frustrulia (with illustration as beautiful as their names) and invites you there to “take your boots and socks off... feel the sensation and temperature of the water”. It fills the reader, and points the walker to eyes full of colours, fine touches and vantage points and sharply precarious piles of stones; it is rich and generous but it never denies that “fertility is cruel”.
Crab Man