In Quinn, Lottie Davies tells the story of a man beset by trauma, grief, and loss at the end of the Second World War. To overcome his trauma, Quinn sets out on a journey across the United Kingdom, immersing himself in landscapes and pathways that predate modern history.
“Quinn started with a walk,” says Lottie Davies from her home in Cornwall. The walkers were Lottie Davies and Sam Weir. Weir played the eponymous Quinn, a figure who was inspired by a character in a Paul Auster story who walks along a coastal path.
“We started in a place called Dollar Cove in Cornwall that was right next to the Southwest Coastal Path and we spent about 5 years walking around Britain. The back story evolved as we went on this journey.”
The back story that evolved was a story based on walking. Over the 5 years of the project, Davies and Weir walked in locations across the length of the British Isles, starting in Cornwall and ending up in the Orkney Isles.
It’s a walk that for the fictional Quinn is an escape from the traumas of the past. As Weir and Davies walked, his fictional narrative developed. He became a resident of Bedminster in Bristol, a veteran of the Second World War who was wounded and became a prisoner-of war. For Quinn, walking is a cathartic event, a way of sublimating his responses to the terror and sorrows of war. Dressed in a wide-lapelled 1940s suit, wearing a flat cap, and carrying a suitcase, he wanders the pathways of Britain on a ceaseless quest for an uncertain future.
From the accompanying dated text we discover that Quinn has returned from service in the Royal Navy to return to a home he no longer recognizes. He is a broken man. And so he walks. Rebecca Solnit writes about walking being a way of manifesting one’s independence and escaping the domestic sphere, and that is what happens with Quinn.
As he walks he gathers up a new life from the places, the people, the things that he finds. “Walking for Quinn was a kind of escape. He would lie in the grass and be of the earth,” says Davies. “He walks because he has nowhere to go. So he keeps moving and he doesn’t stop until he’s left the mainland, he gets to Orkney and the land runs out.”
The resulting story became the basis of a book, an exhibition (titled The Land Runs Out), a recording, and a film, all of which overlap and resonate in different ways.
The book encapsulates the main narrative threads of the story. The images are shown in the sequence in which Quinn’s journey was made as he walks from one end of the nation to the other. It starts with a domestic grounding with a picture of Quinn with his wife Mary and their two baby children standing on Clevedon Beach. There is a celebration of the diversity of the British landscape, old pathways, and of places that have significance for their remoteness and beauty.
“There are places connected to me in Cornwall, in Snowdonia, in Scotland, and there are places connected to the people in the book,” says Davies. “There’s a place in Yorkshire where there was a plane crash and the grandfather of the girl who plays a role in the book was in that crash.”
So in the book, we see the girl collecting bilberries on a Yorkshire moor as Quinn approaches. She offers him a handful and then he walks on.
He’s taking the path less travelled as he walks, wandering through the mountains, moorlands, and coastal paths of Britain. This gives the work a timelessness and a vision of England that is both a balm to the senses and a geological survey. Though at times Quinn walks through the pastoral landscape, most of the time he is walking through a land that time has seemingly forgot, and in that sense it’s a fictional landscape.
He’s immersed in the landscape, his walking dissipating the traumas of the past. Quinn links in to other work that features walking and the second world war such as Michal Iwanowski’s Clear of People, Andrea Botto’s 19-06_26-08-1945, or from an earlier age Primo Levi’s The Truce, a record of Levi’s convoluted return to Italy from the horrors of an Auschwitz labour camp in which he recovers his body and soul amidst the opportunism, chaos and grief of post-war Europe. It’s a book that reminds us that for most of Europe (and indeed for Quinn) the war didn’t end in 1945.
As with all those works, Quinn ends with a destination, a return to a home that once was. For when he gets there, his wife is no longer there. ‘I knocked on the door Mary and when you opened it, it wasn’t you. It was someone else…’
The book ends where it began, with the picture of Quinn with his wife Mary, only now it is folded and marked from being kept close to his heart, to be held and caressed in place of the wife who is no longer there. Why she is no longer there is left for the reader to decide, but there are clues in the newspaper clippings that are reproduced in the back of book.
Though situated in a very specific time, Davies links Quinn to broader ideas of conflict. “That could be me, or someone from Syria, Afghanistan or Sudan. It could be someone today who needs to escape by walking,” she says. “He represents everyone who’s going through trauma and loss.”
“I feel having it in the past makes it more accessible. You can’t put him in contemporary clothing; people see a picture and they judge it on class, on status, on what somebody wears.”
“We also have an attachment to a flawed understanding of the second world war. There was no money, no jobs, people had lost everything. And it still happens now. His story of losing his family is constantly repeating.”
The installation shots of Quinn show a broader edit of the story for exhibition. There are objects, pictures, moving images, sound, and an installation of a 1940s bedroom. “As Quinn walked he picked things up: a stone, a handful of shells, a guidebook,” says Davies, “and these became part of the story.” They are shown in black and white in the back of the book. In the exhibition they are shown in vitrines: a sewing kit, a set of postcards, an old pocket knife.
“I find objects really interesting. You pick up these things and there are fictional memories laid onto the real memories; the £5 note in the exhibition has folds and marks where the hands of hundreds of people have held it. The traces of the past are in the fictional and the real.”
“People have to invest in the story,” says Davies. “The exhibition changes as it goes so it becomes quite immersive. In Coventry at the Herbert, there was a set with a boarding house room with a table where his diary lay which people could read. Unfortunately, it showed at the start of Covid so it was only on for 3 weeks instead of four months.”
“At the Herbert it was shown close to exhibits like the handbag of a woman whose house was bombed in the second world war; so even there, there is a collision between things like the objects he picks up as he walks across the nation.”
Quinn is a complex story in which the landscape is immersive, healing, and nostalgic. It’s a story that bridges past and present and one which raises questions rather than answers them. What happened remains a mystery and that absence of resolution makes Quinn’s sorrow even more real. He walks because he suffers and, you get the feeling, once he stops walking, he will suffer some more.
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Quinn by Lottie Davies has been published and is available from Mutton Row Books.
With thanks to Colin Pantall and Lottie Davies for this feature.
