Lacuna Festivals

The galleries of the lost Festivals

Just like a physical festival, The Lost Festivals have many different galleries in a variety of different places. We have galleries of participatory projects on our Facebook page, artist profiles on our Instagram account, video works on our Youtube channel, a photostream on our Flickr page, a huge range of online events and our festival galleries hosted by ArtSteps.

On this page you can find our twelve curated galleries, each with a separate narrative linked to the overall festival theme of 'Lost.' These narratives are; Lost Spaces, Lost Environments, Lost Realities, Lost Identity, Lost or Abandoned?, Lost Forever?, Lost the Way, Lost Stories, Lost Freedom, Lost Dreams & Desires, Lost Moments & Memories and Lost Connections. The works within each theme not only link to the overall festival theme but also speak with other works in their gallery so that each themed gallery tells a unique story.

Each gallery can be viewed through three main platforms; ArtSteps, Flickr and YouTube. The ArtSteps galleries are embedded - more on how to use these below. To see video works for a particular narrative please visit Lacuna Festivals YouTube channel by clicking on the icon underneath the embedded gallery. You can also visit the Flickr galleries for each narrative by clicking on the Flickr icon.

Using ArtSteps virtual Gallery spaces

All of the ArtSteps galleries are embedded on this page, listed by their narratives below. Please be patient as they may take a while to load, particularly the first time you open this page up. (There is a lot of data for your computer process to make the virtual environments work smoothly. Below are some brief instructions to help you navigate these virtual spaces.) Remember you can also visit the galleries on ArtSteps directly - this may be more effective if you have a slow internet connection or an older device - and you can even download an app to view these galleries on your mobile devices, then you can navigate them using your devices motion sensors.

To visit the galleries on this page, here are some top tips to get you started! To view the gallery as a full page click the second button down on the right hand side (a square). Once you are in full page view you can click on the 'i' button for a brief tutorial on navigation around these virtual spaces. You are then free to explore the space, walking around as if you were visiting a real gallery - just click on a piece to view it larger and to get the gallery label for that piece. The label contains more information about the artist and artwork such as media, size and a brief artist statement. Once you have viewed the gallery, you can click the heart button under neath the gallery to give us a like and/or click the speech bubble button at the bottom right hand side of the screen to leave us a comment about your experience.

An old family home redeveloped into a characterless block of flats, a cemetery underwater after severe flooding, an abandoned classroom and a city contaminated forever. We are constantly creating and deserting spaces, leaving them to their fate – allowing global warming to threaten lowlands, opening and closing industries within a few decades and leaving unwanted spaces to decay and become ruins, letting nature eventually take over. What will become of these spaces in the future? Perhaps they will sink and become the underworld to a new world built on directly on top or simply become part of a dystopian backdrop to shiny new high rises with mirrored fronts?

The natural world is under constant attack from humans; damaged woodlands and wetlands, warming the planet with the burning of fossil fuels, destruction of natural habitats for construction projects and the ongoing pollution of the seas and waterways. Artists considering the environment did so with a critical commentary on our impact on the world. The pieces displayed here emanate a quality of sad inevitability, as if we know that we are already too late to make the necessary changes to save these shrinking natural territories.

Watching the 2020 news and living through a global pandemic it can often feel like we have all lost our grip on reality. Here artists reflect on their experience of lost realities; confronting mental illnesses, gender equality, political motives, the digital information age – where we have access to more information than we could ever consume and the ongoing fight to keep the realities we have. When reality seems more and more like a movie with plot twist after plot twist keeping us on our toes, it is easy to see why ‘Lost Realities’ emerged as a popular concept within this year’s artwork submissions.

Often we feel like we don’t fit, like we are unsure of who or what we are or where we belong in this world. Our identities can be changed through assuming different guises, changing clothes or hairstyles, wearing or not wearing make-up, moving house, changing jobs and relationship breakdowns helping us feel more in control of our identity and enabling us to mould ourselves to fit (or not fit) into different environments and contexts. The ‘Lost Identity’ gallery gathers together works that confront our obsession with identities showcasing work by non-binary and gender fluid artists, immigrant artists who notice one identity fade in the shadow of another and artists who feel like their battles with mental health disfigure their identities to themselves and those around them.

This gallery compares and contrasts the emotions that result from loss and abandonment when these are associated with different causes. Lost objects – those that are lost and found again and those that are never recovered. People lost and abandoned through legislative decisions made for political gain; broken relationships with themselves or abusive relationships with others. Animals abandoned to their fate through human negligence. Places, forever damaged by human carelessness and greed, lost as usable spaces for the foreseeable future.

This gallery seeks to provoke thoughts around our mortality as humans and our response to grief. The only thing certain about our lives is that we are born and that we die, everything else is a variable and yet we seem to struggle with accepting death and grief as everyday concepts. Lost environments, forever destroyed by humans, sit on the wall next to lost cultures and traditions – forever lost because of our engrained need for ‘progression’, westernised development and global commercialism. Sometimes when something or someone is lost forever many weep for it, sometimes no one weeps.

We are told that we have lost our way when we are unsure of what to do next or when we are making questionable decisions – we can be lost in life itself as well as having physically lost the direction in which we are meant to be heading. The works in this gallery compare and contrast what it means to have ‘lost the way’ seeking answers through the juxtaposition of maps, letters, suitcases, spiritual icons and religious concepts. Questionable decisions considered include global travel, food consumption, quests for personal development and the methodical destruction of the very environment that we need to not only thrive but to survive.

Historical stories can be lost over time by the erasure or rewriting of stories by the prevailing rulers –females written out of history by male rulers or cultural traditions lost through invasion and colonisation. Time to start setting the record straight. Victims’ of abuse, those who are vulnerable because of their differences and young people often feel like they have no voice and that their stories are unworthy of being told, let alone heard. Time to start setting the record straight. As globalism ships products out around the world, away from it’s place of creation, the traditions, rituals and history of these items becomes lost in an increasingly homogenised world. Time to start setting the record straight.

The Western world is seen as a shining beacon of freedom, but is it all that it seems? With data collected on each and every one of us at unimaginable rates, more CCTV cameras springing up on street corners, right wing politics seeking for greater control and more exaggerated inequalities ensnaring us within our own lives, it is easy to see why freedom is a contextual concept. Perhaps the grass really is greener on the other side or perhaps everyone is trapped in their own tangled webs, restricting and limiting freedom of movement, thought, action and abilities.

We all have dreams and as we age, the more lost dreams we have as real life inevitably takes over, meaning travelling the world has to give way to a stable job to pay for the rent. Whatever happened to the young girl who wanted to be a firefighter or the young boy who dreamed of being a doctor? This is a gallery filled with nostalgia and sentimentality for times gone by; for things that could never be; for desires that morphed, changed and left us and for those dreams for a better, brighter, future that fade into the dystopian reality of the 21st century.

A collective snapshot of childhood memories, coming of age changes and transitional times in our everyday lives that hold extreme beauty but only for fleeting moments. Equally sad and happy, beautiful and ugly, the pieces here are full of juxtapositions and contrasts. As we look at the artworks in this gallery, we feel connected to the pieces as we can empathise with what is on display. We too have felt these emotions, lived these times, made these memories and lost these memories to the depths of our minds. Allow these thoughtful pieces to illuminate parts of yourself you may have thought lost and forgotten forever.

As technology increases we are more connected than ever before and yet often we can feel further apart – a strange distance created between us where emotional closeness is lost to instant online connections. This gallery gathers together artworks that speak of broken connections and damaged bonds – some purposefully ‘lost’ through systematic destruction, some sadly fading away as the onslaught of commercialism and globalism continues to take over the world. Some of these connections were lost by chance or fate, simply never meant to be whilst others have been ripped apart leaving a simmering feeling of resentment and rawness.

Lacuna Festivals

Support Artist-led events

The galleries of the lost Festivals

Using ArtSteps virtual Gallery spaces

lost spaces

Lost environments

Lost Realities

Lost identity

Lost or abandoned?

Lost Forever?

Lost the way

lost stories

Lost Freedom

Lost Dreams & Desires

lost moments & memories

lost connections