Surviving Objects [all the remains]

About

In July 1917, Lieut. W. G. Hicks was killed in France. He left behind a life in Sevenoaks and a fiancée, Jessie Ellman, to whom he never returned. His name is now crumbling on a war memorial in Sevenoaks. This almost unknown soldier's name is fading from the stone in which it was carved, just as the Great War passes out of living memory. This installation created by contemporary artist Jane Churchill 94 years later, discovers moments of lives once lived and tells glimpses of their story through objects and artefacts. The installation begins with found artefacts and goes on to explore both the factual and historical items in the collection alongside fictitious histories of two people whose story we can never fully know. The artwork develops a narrative in the space between the facts of imagined lives and the myths of factual objects. Inspired by and exploring the relationship between museum collection, archive and created artefacts, Jane's work invites you into a world between truth and fiction, the real and the imagined, and asks what can be uncovered about a man's life from just a few surviving objects.