#conservators

I'm only a conservator here. Who did I miss?

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November 4th is #AskAConservator Day! Conservators around the world will be answering questions about their work in the spirit of sharing knowledge and celebrating the growth of the field, and our #BKMConservation staff would love to hear from you. Our conservation lab is made up of ten conservators, four interns working across paper, painting, and object conservation as well as four Collection Management staff. Our conservators worked on approximately 840 objects and artworks this year while our Collections Management team has worked on multiple large, long-term storage/rehousing projects across all our collections.

Have a question for any of them? Look out for our post and Instagram stories on November 4th. The lab will be answering questions from 9am-5pm EST.⁠

Get Those Books Moving : Part 3 

All over the world, there has been an increasing awareness of peoples’ heritage in a bid to mark their cultural identity. Additionally, this has brought with it the expression of society, enriching lives, and bringing pleasure. More concern has been on the preservation of that heritage, and people understand that conservator’s networks or bodies are fundamental in the realization of that task. Follow us on the traces of time ...

https://www.romoe.com/conservatorsnet

(Public Art Conservator Andrea Bowes with the new conservation microscope)

Microscopic attention to detail is the name of the public art conservation game. Dental scalers, sponges, airbrushes, saws, rags, and grinders are all part of a conservator’s arsenal. Microscopes add a high-tech level of detail. This month, the Edmonton Arts Council Public Art Conservation Department welcomed the latest addition to its battery of tools. The portable microscope came to the EAC from the United States and will allow staff to zoom in on the tiniest details as they go about their daily work of stewarding and maintaining the City of Edmonton Public Art Collection.

The microscope’s first task will be to assist the conservation team as it embarks on the final stages of “Mission: Mural Rescue,” a multiyear project that entails the removal, restoration, and reinstallation of a 52-year-old 1,000-pound mural by then-Alberta artist Norman Yates at the Stanley A. Milner Library. The untitled mural was painted in the late 1960s.

Public Art and Conservation Director David Turnbull says, “[This artwork is] the only known surviving artwork in Edmonton’s Public Art Collection commissioned for Canada’s Centennial.” This historic importance, and the stature of the artist – Yates founded the University of Alberta’s graduate fine arts program – inspired the conservation team to take a radical approach. Faced with the extensive gutting and renovation of the Edmonton Public Library’s main branch, the EAC conservation team wielded tissue paper, fish glue, angle grinders, and brute force to preserve the painting, cut the wall into sections, then moved the entire artwork to the EAC Conservation Lab.

(Fragment of the architectural plaster that underlaid the artist’s plaster layer upon which the mural was painted)

Over the past two years, Public Art Conservator Andrea Bowes has ground about two inches of architectural plaster from the back of each piece to expose the artist’s original, one-inch, fragile plaster layer. The pieces are now stored on wooden A-frames, their backs stabilized with a skeleton of lightweight aluminum channel, fibreglass, resin, and sand. The painting itself is still obscured by its tissue paper cover.

“Now that we can safely handle each piece, we can start restoring the damage on the surface. We’ll use the microscope to make sure that when we repair damaged edges that the surface lines up properly and the surrounding surfaces are even and in plane. That’s not a thing you can do just by eyeballing!”

“The next stages will be painstaking and a lot of fun,” says Andrea, “The microscope is going to be integral. In the meantime, we’re really enjoying the novelty of looking at several projects in the lab at a level of detail that wasn’t possible until now.”

This is the third article in a series:

Click here for the first article from February 2017. 

Click here for the second chapter from April 2018.

Stay tuned for a new chapter as the project enters the next phase!