LJK / CFQ
Lauren Joy Kennett and Cole Flynn Quirke
Lauren Joy Kennett and Cole Flynn Quirke join for an exhibition to celebrate new books of their work being released by publishers Jane & Jeremy.
Both artists use the camera, diaristic techniques, text and collage as tools for inward investigation and making sense of the world within and around them.
Brighton based Jane & Jeremy create limited edition artists books that come with a small signed print. The exhibition will take place at The Bookend, their bookshop in Kemp Town.
Sorry I'm Not Sorry
Lauren Joy Kennett
“I say sorry all the time. Sorry because I think I’m wrong or I’m in the way or I’m late or I forgot to do something I said I would do or I missed another appointment. Sorry sorry sorry and sometimes I say I’m sorry even if it doesn’t make sense when I don’t know what to else to say.”
Lauren Joy Kennett’s (LJK) debut book, Sorry I’m Not Sorry, is an autobiographical exploration of a misaligned identity, continuing the narrative first introduced in her solo exhibition of the same name.
Published by Photoworks, in collaboration with Jane & Jeremy, the book presents her personal perspective on living with undiagnosed autism, expressed through hand-cut photographic collages and narrative text.
The collages, composed of cut and reassembled self-portraits and family photographs, reinforce her sense of dissonance as she attempts to piece together disparate memories, emotions and external judgments. Sorry I’m Not Sorry explores feelings of alienation, misunderstanding, and the search for coherence. Refrains of "I’m tired" and "I’m sorry" capture the exhaustion of conforming to societal norms, while the visual distortions in her collages reflect her fragmented self-image and the struggle to integrate into an unaccommodating world.
Sorry I’m Not Sorry uses stark visual metaphors to explore the often invisible challenges of living with autism. The project attempts to untangle the journey toward self-understanding and acceptance and is a pivotal moment in LJK’s personal story that now contributes to the growing conversation around neurodivergence in contemporary art.
LJK is an autobiographical artist working with photography, hand-cut collage, and written text. Her practice focuses on pain, confusion, and misunderstanding as a way to process her experiences of living with undiagnosed autism.
LJK uses cutting and collaging techniques to create fragmented self-portraits and disassembled family photographs, accompanied by an unfiltered inner monologue. These works jump between past and present, revealing self-doubt, anxiety, and existential fears, while exploring the complexities of her neurodivergence.
Through the exploration of her body and personal history, LJK's work centres on childhood trauma, social anxiety, and emotional turmoil, transforming personal suffering into a means of understanding and acceptance.
House of The Stray Dog
Cole Flynn Quirke
‘House of the Stray Dog’ is Cole Flynn Quirke’s(CFQ's) latest visual odyssey shot in the two years following his autobiographical study of youth and nostalgia, ‘Even a Maniac Can Learn to Drive’.
‘Stray Dog’ departs from the scrapbook-like schoolboy methodology of his earlier projects, instead oscillating around a series of intricately woven visual motifs whose gravitational pull intensifies with each turn of the page.
The images presented in ‘Stray Dog’ constitute a heady cocktail of the natural and the human-formed, marking an egress from the street-pounding adolescent urbanity around which ‘Maniac’ centred. This time CFQ strings together a series of photographic offerings that weave a visual narrative around the bittersweetness of self-realisation and the solitude of adulthood.
Evolving beyond a coming of age discourse on the excesses of juvenescence, this latest instalment in CFQ’s body of work does not give up its meaning easily; its repeated trope is to present the same phenomenon or moment in a different light, or different life, lapping concentric circles of emotion around the viewer like a taut cord about a reddening thumb. A thicket of webs and veils punctuate the work, with creatures dead and alive chaperoning us on our journey into the fray. Throughout the book, a vortical swell of order answers to chaos; swans swimming in random, gorgeous synchrony, patterns emerging from kitchen windows and abandoned dinner plates.
Above all, with characteristic playfulness CFQ stitches together celluloid-esque frames of haunting cinematic mundanity: the cut scenes of daily life that linger far longer than blockbuster poster shots. With filmic elegance and the decisive bite of a master director, CFQ's dreamlike arrangement of images gnaw at the coattails and yap about the ankles even after the curtain has fallen.
CFQ's photographic work is fuelled by a fear of memory loss after his Grandfather lost his. CFQ obsessively captures all reaches of his life, archiving them in a loose yet paradoxically meticulous manor.
61 St George's Rd
Brighton
BN2 1EF
Map
4 October–16 November
Thursday 10:00–17:00
Friday 10:00–17:00
Saturday 11:00–16:00
