Since 2014 I have been working on a project which has taken my work away from simply still photography, and allowed me to include moving image, writing, found and made objects, and gallery installation in my creative life. I have been using collected memories and stories, and real and imagined histories as inspiration for much of my work for some time, and Quinn is an extension of this interest – taken a step further where I have allowed myself to create an entirely fictional story, and character; William Henry Quinn.
Quinn is a young man in post-Second World War Britain, who 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. While it is intentionally set in a time far from our contemporary world, Quinn’s story is inspired by, and about, the experiences of young men and women post-trauma at all times in history – and it is sobering to realise that there will be many young people faced with a similar challenge in the post-COVID world which is ahead of us. 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. My hope is that in learning Quinn’s story, the reader may come to understand more about their own search for existential meaning and purpose in life. As Quinn travels on his odyssey it is revealed to be both a physical and metaphorical journey mediated by the British landscape, a geography that is both changed and unchanged since the 1940s. The ancient byways along which he has travelled remain as they were then, and yet with the immutability of change and the unremitting nature of time passing, lives and memories change and fade.
The project evolved as it progressed, and more techniques of expression suggested themselves in addition to photographs and moving image pieces; a created written narrative and the inclusion of Quinn’s ‘belongings’ in immersive room-set installation gallery works. 2018 the work was first exhibited at FORMAT in Derby, and then last year in a much more expansive form at The Herbert Art Gallery & Museum in Coventry, where I was able to work with the museum’s archivist to display items from their collection alongside Quinn’s “personal ephemera”. I have been constantly excited by the opportunities I have had to expand on the experience for the viewer/reader, and the idea has always been to provide an immersive, layered experience in different ways, so that visiting an exhibition or seeing the work online, or indeed in a book, could be much like simultaneously reading a novel, visiting the theatre, and going to the cinema.
I resisted suggestions to create a book until late last year; I felt I needed to have shown a complete and realised physical installation of some scale before attempting to fix the project to printed pages, and now here I am finally! My hope is that the monograph provides an additional new way to experience the work, independently from both the gallery space and the online environment in which we find ourselves all too often in 2021. Dean Pavitt, who has designed the book, has really taken time to understand what Quinn is about, and what I have tried to achieve with it, which has been a truly delightful experience. We have worked to emulate the physical sensation of Quinn’s movement visually through the numerous foldout pages throughout the publication, and different sections are highlighted through varying paper stock. My favourite element is the production of Quinn’s diary, which is printed on opaque fine paper itself directly inspired by the small annotated diary my grandfather wrote while deployed in Normandy during WWII, now a precious element in our family archive. And one final feature is that readers can also choose to listen to an online recording of the actor who plays Quinn, Samuel J Weir, narrating the diary while turning the pages – my aim was to make the book as close to a portable, handheld version of the exhibition experience as I could.
book - Lottie is currently in the process of self-publishing ‘Quinn’ as a limited edition photobook… available to pre-order now! Released as a standard edition and a beautiful presentation edition (presented in a clamshell case with 5 limited edition prints)… this is a beautifully designed book, perfectly showcasing Lottie’s extraordinary & original body of work. Highly recommended folks!
All images & text © Lottie Davies
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