We had a great trip to the Imperial War Museum and we were really pleased that the community members who have been working with us on the project were able to join us.
Sean Lang has been to the museum many times so was able to lead us to the correct entrance. We had to leave our lunches and bags and then we split into two groups. One group went first of all to the Truth and Memory exhibition of WW1 art. It was good that we’d looked at paintings in our session the week before as we now had the chance to see some of the works we’d looked at previously for real. We had a museum educator with us and, with her, we discussed some particular works and then also did some work on our own. She gave us quotations and we had to go and look for paintings which we thought illustrated the quotations and sketch parts of these. For me, the Paul Nash works were very striking – they were so empty and dead.
After we’d had our session in the exhibition we had a chance to visit the WW1 galleries and spent the rest of the time there. There was so much to see.