Lottie Davies - Quinn: Until the Land Runs Out

About

Since 2014, British photographer, artist, and writer Lottie Davies has worked extensively on the series  Quinn - an intricately researched and executed large-scale multimedia project that extends far beyond  the gallery walls.

Quinn recounts the eponymous fictional story of a young man, William Henry Quinn, who, in post-Second  World War Britain, walks from the south-west of England to the far north of Scotland, in what becomes an  epic and symbolic journey. It is a meditation on grief, loss, loneliness, the human search for meaning, and the possibility of redemption through time and landscape, pertinent across the ages.  

Davies has consciously created in this series a multi-dimensional view of the titular figure and his story  by using moving-image works and large format photographs, ‘personal’ ephemera, text, and installations  created to be viewed and read side-by-side, much like simultaneously reading a novel, visiting the theatre,  and going to the cinema. The viewer can use these visual clues as a way of untangling as much or as little of  the narrative as they desire.  

In the exhibition at London’s gallery@oxo numerous still images will be accompanied by moving image works, a display of physical objects owned by Quinn, and an installation of Quinn’s bedroom recreated in great detail for the visitor to move around in - to sit on his bed and read from his diary themselves, or scan a QR code to listen to an  online recording of the actor who plays Quinn, Samuel J Weir, narrating the diary -  continuing to blur the boundaries of the real and the imagined.  One of the moving image pieces will be projected onto the window at the front of the gallery space, visible to the thousands of people who make their own daily journeys by the River Thames in this popular part of central London.

The exhibition is the third instalment of an ongoing tour of Quinn across the UK, each comprising distinct installations devised specifically for each venue. This sees Quinn represented in a very different way on each showing so that it is never the same ‘telling’ of the series, while maintaining the strong visual themes of the work. Following the display in London, which will focus more on the gallery installation and an intimate audience experience, Quinn will be exhibited in October in North Wales at Oriel Colwyn to coincide with the Northern Eye International Photography Festival 2021. Installation shots of Quinn: A Journey at the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry from 2020 can be viewed at Google Arts and Culture.

While fictional, Davies has created Quinn in response to the real experiences of young men and women  post-trauma, both in the early twentieth century and now. The life changes imposed on each generation  by conflict and global socio-economic collapse, as well as personal tragedy, produces a constant stream of  people left untethered in the world, often literally travelling in any way they can, to find a new home, a new  purpose and to rebuild their place in the world. In learning his story, the reader may come to understand  more about their own search for existential meaning and purpose in life. Although Davies initiated work on  Quinn in 2014, clear comparisons to the Covid-19 pandemic can be seen in Quinn’s own mourning for his  previous life, demonstrating one more way in which Davies’ series transcends time and place.  

Davies’ work is concerned with stories and personal histories, employing a deliberate reworking of visual  vocabularies with the intention of evoking a sense of recognition and narrative. Quinn acts as a natural and  significant continuation of Davies’ work.