Are You Lost?
2024–2025
Are You Lost? is a series of film, sound and textile installations across Bowland which highlight the diverse voices and perspectives of the communities that live around the area. A series of temporary installations will be shown across the National Landscape, both in accessible public spaces and in more remote, largely-unused spaces in 2025.
Produced with the Forest of Bowland National Landscape, Lancaster Arts and Blaze Arts. Commissioned by Nature Calling, the first national programme of new art commissions by the National Landscapes Association.
Rob has worked with both young people and the general public around the fringes of Bowland in creative workshops throughout Winter and Spring of 2024-25. The words, sounds, film, images, drawings, mappings and sculptures produced in these engagements will all contribute to the creation of the installations in Summer 2025.
Installations
The artwork will open to the public for the first time at Pendle Festival of Culture on 28 June in partnership with Building Bridges, in Nelson town centre on the outskirts of the Forest of Bowland. It will then travel to Dunsop Bridge on the weekend of 2-3 August, where it will be situated in Jinny’s Barn. The final location for the installation will be in the heart of Gisburn Forest on 30-31 August, over a weekend that will feature artist workshops and a singing performance.
Film
The installation films have been created using pinhole lenses made with natural materials, including seed pods, skeleton leaves and lichen, by young people in workshops. The filming locations were selected through workshops where people mapped places that held important or special meaning for them. These locations held rich local stories, life events and moments of meaning and are paired with a Super 8 film shot by a local resident in the immediate aftermath of flash flooding in Dunsop Bridge in the Summer of 1967, offering a creative archiving of the past, present and possible future of the Bowland landscape.
Sound
The installation soundscape is woven with sounds made in the workshops and includes field recordings of birdsong, wind, machinery and weather, and choral improvisations with young people across the Bowland landscape. The work includes recordings made in Bowland’s streams and pools with hydrophones and in its bedrock, soil and sphagnum moss with geophones. The multi-channel soundscape includes the voices of young people from around the fringes of Bowland narrating their everyday experiences. They reflect on the multiple meanings of access to the Bowland landscape, whether physical, logistical, imaginative, or political.
Textiles
The large sculptural textile pieces are created with Lancashire textile artist Kate O’Farrell, drawing from the cotton mill weaving practices of East Lancashire, the textile traditions of Gujarat, where a significant diaspora in Nelson is from, and natural materials and processes derived from the Bowland landscape. Together with the sound and film installation, the textiles shuttle between the inside and outside of the Bowland landscape, revealing a place shaped by migration, movement, and its links to the wider world.
Community
Are You Lost? has emerged through creative workshops, walks, talks and activities with communities both in the centre and across the fringes of Bowland. Hundreds of people have lent their voices, perspectives and skills to help shape the artwork over Winter 2024 and Spring 2025. In particular, young people from Yes Hub, the This is Nelson youth group, Lomeshaye Primary School and Marsden Heights Community College in Nelson, and SELFA in Bentham have been central to this process. You can hear many of their voices through the installation, and in the project podcasts.
Find out more and sign up to the mailing list on the Lancaster Arts website.
You can keep track of Are You Lost? through the project podcast.
The Are You Lost? podcast is hosted by Bowland artist and writer Rob St. John. Its offers glimpses into the Are You Lost? project as it develops through 2025, inviting a range of guests to partake in conversations about art, nature, community and countryside access.
Are You Lost? will be a series of film, sound and textile installations across Bowland which highlight the diverse voices and perspectives of the communities that live around the area. A festival series of temporary installations will be created across the National Landscape, both in accessible public spaces and in more remote, largely-unused spaces in 2025. Rob will be working with producers Lancaster Arts & Blaze Arts.
Rob is an artist and writer based in Lancashire. His practice is focused on the blurring of nature and culture in contemporary landscapes. He works across sound, moving image, text and installation. His work has been shown and heard at Tate Modern, Victoria and Albert Museum, The Barbican, The British Museum and many others. Rob will be working with young people from around Burnley and its surrounding towns.
Are You Lost? is part of Nature Calling, a national programme, run by the National Landscapes Association, in partnership with Activate and supported by the Poetry School and funded by Arts Council England and Defra.
https://www.naturecalling.org.uk/rob-st-john
This episode was recorded over a series of workshops with young people attending the Yes Hub centre in Nelson in February 2025.
After receiving training on narrative writing, interviewing and sound recording from Rob, the group planned, wrote and recorded this podcast together. Working around the broad theme of ‘home and the hills’, the group built on their shared love of cold case podcasts to explore a series of ‘hidden histories’ of Pendle and Bowland.
Four stories were researched and recorded by the group: the Quernmore Dark Ages bog burial in Bowland; CLR James’ time in Nelson in the early 1930s; the 1612 Pendle Witch Trials; and the unsolved 1980 murder of Mohammed Arif in Nelson.
Each story sparked discussion amongst the group, including contemporary issues around equality, persecution, safety and nature connectedness in society. Together, the young people offer an empathetic and thought-provoking lens on everyday life in East Lancashire, and how the relationship between the town and the hills has shaped this place over time.
Despite the rich stories they tell, if anything, it is these young people who are Pendle’s hidden gems.
This podcast was written, narrated and recorded by Dua, Zainab, Callum, Suli, Shaun, Aaron, Mehvish and Saud. The theme tune was written, performed and recorded by Aaron.
Yes Hub offers support, training and activities for people aged 16–24 who are out of work in the Pendle area.
