Echoes Across the Century - Jessie Ellman​/​Jane Churchill

Echoes Across the Century was a free immersive exhibition held at the Guildhall Art Gallery in the City of London from 31 March to 16 July 2017, conceived and delivered by heritage artist Athena Jane Churchill (also known as Jane Churchill) and producer Alison Truphet. Commemorating the centenary of the First World War, it was made possible through a collaboration between City of London livery companies and schools, supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund. At its emotional core was Churchill's installation Degrees of Separation, a deeply personal work centred on her great-great-uncle, Second Lieutenant William Goss Hicks, who was killed on the Western Front on 3 July 1917, leaving behind his fiancée Jessie Ellman in Kent. The installation — part museum collection, part archive of dreams — drew on surviving personal effects, sepia photographs, moth assemblages, sculpture, an original saddle from the Battle of the Somme, and objects made by Jessie Ellman herself in the aftermath of Hicks' death. Woven throughout Churchill's installation was the work of over 240 students from more than 14 London schools, who worked alongside her and the livery companies to create artistic responses to objects and stories from both the trenches and the home front — pieces ranging from recruitment posters and playing cards used as war metaphors to painted ambulances and a peace memorial. One reviewer described the exhibition as "essential viewing… heart-wrenching, moving, powerful and beautiful," with the finished show comprising over 600 objects through which real and imagined tales were told via heritage artefacts and responsive artworks.