The full film from Rob St John and Kate O’Farrell’s Are You Lost? project — a series of film, sound and textile installations exploring the diverse voices, histories and ecologies around the Forest of Bowland in Lancashire — is now available to watch online.

Rob 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 all contributed to the creation of the installations in Summer 2025.

The installation films were created using pinhole lenses made with natural materials — including feathers, flower petals, cotton grass, 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 across Bowland. These locations revealed rich local stories, life events and moments of meaning. The pinhole films are paired with a Super 8 film shot by local resident Joe Pye in the immediate aftermath of flash flooding in the Dunsop Valley in the Summer of 1967, offering a creative archiving of the past, present and possible future of the Bowland landscape. Watch the film below.

An additional film, compiling footage from the public workshops, walks and events that informed Are You Lost? can be viewed below.

Are You Lost? was produced with the Forest of Bowland National Landscape, Lancaster Arts and Blaze Arts. It was commissioned by Nature Calling, the first national programme of new art commissions by the National Landscapes Association.

You can find out more about the project here, via Rob’s website.