Quinn, Until the Land Runs Out, The Northern Eye Festival 2021

Exhibition including room set installation, large format printed photographs (wall vinyl), projections and ephemera.

Quinn is a multi-media art project, realised over a six-year period from 2014-2020. It follows on from the artist’s previous work on exploring the artistic and photographic representation of memory and of historical and personal past moments, and the philosophical understanding of conflict and our collective past. Following work such as that by Joel Sternfeld (On This Site, 1996), Broomberg and Chanarin The Day That Nobody Died, 2008), Chloe Dewe Matthews (Shot At Dawn, 2014), and Larson Shindelman (Geolocation, 2009-16) and works of literature (Paul Auster, New York Trilogy, 1987), 'Quinn' represents a major progression in Davies’ work, incorporating for the first time written narrative, installation and collected ephemera as well as large-format photographs and moving image works.

The work addresses the questions of how individual humans and human society as a whole respond to trauma, loss and grief. Each generation experiences changes imposed by conflict, environmental events and global socio-economic upheavals, leaving a stream of people either literally travelling alone or in groups or families to rebuild their place in the world, or individually attempting to overcome personal tragedy or misfortune. Quinn explores both psychological and physical responses to these, and asks whether landscape and time can be used as a tool for understanding, reconciliation and potential recovery. It is a meditation on the human search for meaning and the possibility of redemption.

The exhibition at The Northern Eye Festival was the fourth in an ongoing tour across the UK with distinct installations devised specifically for each venue. Each presented 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, it is 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. The exhibition was in Colwyn Bay itself, presenting vinyls and moving image within empty shop spaces and other easily accessible public spaces.

As the character Quinn travels on his odyssey it is revealed to be both a physical and metaphorical journey mediatedby 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. At the
exhibition in Colwyn Bay, the viewer metaphorically and physically walked alongside Quinn and, in learning his story, may have come to understand more about their own search for existential meaning and purpose in life.

While fictional, Davies 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. 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.

• Organisation
• Organisation
• Publisher