This practice-research redraws literary and natural landscapes via an original entanglement of geopoetics, feminist and literary theory, walking, and geometry.The project is translated through a process-orientated, materially-driven methodology. Using fresco, assemblage, domestic arts, biomaterials, sound and printmaking, the research dissolves literary texts in a process neologised here as ‘dewriting’. By testing the archetypal properties of paper, ink, and milk, the project creates imaginary libraries, books conceptualised as ‘desemic’ texts,‘pages’ made of laser-etched milk, and frescoed objects Using these methods and materials, I extract fictional and nonfictional women from their original stories, both from my past and from works by George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, and Virginia Woolf. I focalise these women as art objects, reconfiguring them in new, communal narratives.The catalyst for all four women is my invented character known as May who has walked the natural landscape for hundreds of years. May is a composite woman; she embodies both the Medieval life-writer Margery Kempe, myself as a literary scholar, and the spirit of women who have walked the earth for centuries. May, who moves conceptually across wild terrain with her distinctive travelling library, creates a space that is enabling and unbounded for the women characters who come after her. She is both repository and synthesis.The central research question is whether May and her library can configure limitless, newly-readable possibilities for entrapped female characters travelling unfamiliar territory.

Taking the form of a legend, this research dewrites restless, oppressed and neglected Maggie from The Mill on the Floss, Rhoda from The Waves, Lucy from Villette, and Susie, my impoverished great aunt born in 1899. In dissolving the literary and familial texts that hold these characters up, the project asks whether women can be re-embodied in new and mutually sustaining ways; what role might excavation (of both self and landscape) play in decoding and rewriting women as they walk without their texts? What might emerge from their newly materialised and reconfigured life stories? How can these re-visualised narratives draw attention to women’s ongoing struggle for intellectual enrichment?

This inquiry uses a ‘seeing’ frame of the strange loop, a geometric form with a logic- defying ability to continually rise in height whilst returning to where it started. It is a democratic and equalising construct and, as such, is a leveller. A strange loop is infinitely expandable and, like a library, can be filled with new women and new texts, ad infinitum.The research assesses whether the self-referential construct of a strange loop can produce a new visual language for women in the landscape and address a series of political questions about their entitlement to walk unhindered and unjudged.

Life-writing, with its infinitely flexible scope, extracts the project from the confines of the more rigid terms of ‘autography’, ‘autobiography’, or ‘abridgement’. In an original contribution to the interdisciplinary fields of life-writing and visual storytelling, characters are liberated from their fictions, dewritten, and entangled via visual-art.The work looks through and beyond the surfaces of past and future landscapes, giving space to fictional bodies and new narratives. It dewrites and rewrites a visual legend of potential inclusivity.