Are You Lost?
2024–2025
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.
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.
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
Rob meets walking guide and historian Nick Burton on the Nick of Pendle, and then archaeologist Dr Rick Peterson at the Fairy Holes Cave above Whitewell in the Forest of Bowland. Their chats cover Pendle Hill’s radical histories, rights of access movements, Quaker revelations, the founding of the Pennine Way, folklore, cairns, ruins, caves, death…
