: Conservation

Sorry about the awful pun in the title. But, yes, it's that time of year, the sun is out, spring's officially here and it's getting warmer. Fantastic you may say, but for our Conservators and Volunteers a new battle is about to begin! As well as our lovely lambs and piglets, less desirable creatures are stirring. These are the insect pests, such as moths, carpet beetles and woodworm, that if left unchecked would quite happily eat our museum and its collections!

This week the volunteer conservation team were introduced to the enemy. In the natural world these insects perform an essential task, but in the confines of our historic houses, or anyone's home in fact, they can cause untold damage especially to items made from wool, fur, feathers, leather, paper and wood.

We have decided to go for a two-pronged attack. The first is to re-introduce traditional deterrent methods. Last year we worked with the gardening team collecting and drying a range of aromatic plants such as Tansy, Wormwood, Rue, Rosemary and Lavender traditionally used to deter insects. From the selection grown in our gardens we have created the extremely potent St Fagans blend.

Now we are devising ways to deploy our deterrent in sufficient quantities that might have an effect. For this we found tights ideal for the task! Yes, that's correct, tights. These are especially useful for items of clothes hung up on display, they enable us to place the aromatic plants in the more inaccessible areas of a garment, such as down sleeves!

The second method of attack is of course good old fashioned housekeeping. Spring is the time to open up the house after a long winter and give everything a good clean, or in our case a good beating.

I volunteer one day per week with National Museum Cardiff’s Preventive Conservation team who is responsible for the care of the museum’s collections.

So what constitutes a typical day in the life of a Preventive Conservation volunteer? Typical is not a word that you can really use because it is pretty rare that we’ll be doing the same thing two weeks in a row. Looking after museum collections involves many diverse jobs.

My first ever task as a volunteer was to replace the silica gel in some of the object storage boxes in one of the Archaeology stores. Each of the plastic boxes contains a unique object. The silica gel keeps the object dry, which prevents metals corroding, for example helmets and swords. It’s pretty exciting to work in a museum store, see different parts of the past and know that you had a hand in preserving objects for the future.

What else has this volunteer done? Spot checking for pests in the Entomology store was a pretty strange experience. We look over the insect collections for signs of pest damage. Yes, the dead insects in the store are at risk of being eating by live insects! It really gives this sense of awe and then sadness when you see beautiful insects, both large and small, that you’d never imagined you’d see in real life and then you spot parts where they’ve been eaten by a pest. Looking over the collection regularly, and spotting pest activity early, means that specimens are not damaged by pests.

Most recently we’ve been moving some of the silver and jade objects in an Art store into new storage cases. If you ever get the chance to do this let me give you some advice; don’t think about the value of the objects you’re moving. If you do then you will be nervous. Instead focus on how amazing these objects are and how you’re helping to continue their story by making sure they are stored correctly. The museum objects will stick around a while longer because of your help.

In closing I only have this to say; if you ever get the opportunity to volunteer at a museum you should do it. It may end up giving you some of the best experiences of your life. That’s what it did for me.

Stefan Jarvis.

Find out more about care of collections at Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales here. 

A number of months ago, I told you that we are currently busy preparing objects for our new galleries.  The most recent one to land on our work table is a Memorial sampler.  It has an embroidered inscription, carried out in cross-stitch using silk thread, which reads: ‘In loving memory of / Elizabeth Morgan, / formerly of Llanishan / who died Dec 6^th 1885 / Aged 30 years / and was interred at / Glyn-Taff Cemetery / A Ray of light from God’s own light - / She beamed and made of life the best / She touched the earth and made it bright / She blest us all and went to rest.’

The sampler was donated by the great-grand daughter of Elizabeth Morgan, T. A. Bennett, from Pen-y-Graig, Rhondda. 

Memorial sampler, for Gweithdy, F80.183

The interesting thing about this sampler is that the ground is not textile but is made from card punched through with a gridwork of holes, through which the embroidery is worked.  As it is made from both textile and paper elements this has given us an opportunity to tackle its conservation as a cross-disciplinary project; drawing on our respective expertise in both textile and paper conservation.

Looking at the object in its frame, the senior conservator archives and I could already see that the sampler had been badly mounted in the past, having been adhered directly to a rigid card backing.  This has been partly responsible for causing splits in the card ground as the unevenly applied adhesive restricted its natural expansion and contraction through changes in environmental humidity levels.  Our challenge here will be to devise a method of removing the embroidery from this unsuccessful backing and to come up with a new method of stabilising and mounting it, so that it can be displayed safely.  As we get stuck into the project, we shall give you updates on how the work is progressing.

While I enjoy going to the Youth Forum very much, I have to say a once-in-a-lifetime experience was not what I was expecting when I turned up last week. But there we were, in the art conservation room, a few feet away from an original Van Gogh, out of its frame on the next table, having just come back from being loaned to an American museum. I could have actually touched it (and I was quite tempted, though of course I didn’t).

Now, I’m not exactly an art aficionado, as you can properly tell by the way I haven’t included the name of the painting because I don’t know it, but I have to say it was pretty amazing. 

However, the focus of the meeting was actually the imposing The Welsh at Mametz Wood by war artist Christopher Williams, which is going to be part of a new exhibition focusing on the First World War battle at Mametz in a few months time.

This is a battle where hundreds of men from the Welsh Division were killed in July 1916, and thousands more were injured, something that the painting certainly doesn’t shy away from. It’s big, bloody, and quite brutal. While war sketches of poppies blooming among the trenches and beleaguered soldiers limping through mud evoke the tragedy of the slaughter that took place, they arguably don’t capture the fighting itself, but the aftermath, the few moments of calm in a four-year storm.

Christopher Williams (1873-1934), The Welsh Division at Mametz Wood, 1916 © National Museum of Wales

Williams’ painting does the opposite. The desperate struggle of the hand-to-hand slaughter was immediately obvious. It felt almost claustrophobic, the way the soldiers were almost piling on top of each other, climbing over their fallen comrades to try and take out the machine gunner. It was certainly a world away, as we discussed, from the posters bearing Lord Kitchener encouraging young men to enlist. We also talked about the way the painting is quite beautifully composed, almost in a Renaissance style.

It was hard to look at, but at the same time it was something you wanted to look at. 

After this, we went to the archives to look at some sketches made by Williams and other artists while at the trenches. I was about to get goosebumps for the second time that evening - one of them still had mud from the trenches staining the edges!

In any other context, 100-year-old mud probably wouldn’t have been very exciting, but this mud is so strongly linked in people’s minds with images of the First World War.

Think of the trenches, and you think of mud. People slept, ate and died surrounded by this mud; it seems to be inextricably bound up with the nightmare of having to live and fight in that environment, and made looking at the sketches even more powerful.

Another document we looked at was a sort of manual given to recruits of the Royal Welsh Division, containing poems, stories and pictures that the soldiers would have submitted themselves. It was touching to see one of the ways they would have injected moments of humour into their lives as soldiers, and also their own perspectives on their experiences. All in all, I’m really looking forward to seeing how this exhibition comes together, and learning more about Mametz, a part of the war I hadn’t even heard of until a couple of weeks ago. 

Holly Morgan Davies, 

National Museum Cardiff Youth Forum

Mrs Beeton, spreading Victorian housekeeping wisdom through the medium of her 1861 classic “Book of Household Management” (still in print in 2016!), said in her introduction: “What moved me, in the first instance, to attempt a work like this, was the discomfort and suffering which I had seen brought upon men and women by household mismanagement.”

Every conservator can identify with that; how many times have we seen objects damaged by inadequate environmental controls, neglected pest management, or insufficient pollution control? Panel paintings will split when the humidity in a gallery fluctuates widely; taxidermy displays are devoured by dermestid beetles; and lead objects, even minerals, corrode to dust in the presence of airborne organic acids, a typical indoor pollutant.

For conservators, the modern version of Mrs Beeton’s book is the National Trust’s “Manual of Housekeeping”. This is a book that has grown over the years into something now requiring a good sized tree to print it on – and, according to the National Trust’s paper conservation advisor, Andrew Bush, should be the only book in your collection that is badly damaged (from frequent use for reference purposes, of course). Conservation has changed from the use of traditional remedies into a science in its own right, with many dedicated scientific journals where the latest research is published. The National Trust, as one of the largest employers of conservators in the UK, runs an in-house training programme to ensure dissemination of cutting edge research to the coal face, as it were. Last week I had the pleasure of going through this week-long training – and a pleasure it was indeed.

The course (held this year at Attingham Park, an almost 250 year old mansion in rural Shropshire) is both an introduction for new staff and a refresher for long established conservators, which is reflected in the intense programme: each day was packed with demonstrations, workshops and lectures. Shorter sessions introduce the agents of deterioration and advice on the care of carpets, rugs and paintings and their frames. Practical workshops deal with diverse topics such as the conservation of paper, ceramics, metals and natural stone – each with their own material properties, risks and preservation techniques.

Even Mrs Beeton was able to tell us that “Essence of Lemon will remove grease, but will make a spot itself in a few days”, but did you know that it takes up to seven people to remove a large painting safely from a wall? Or that the corrosion on the copper kettle leaves permanent damage in the form of pits which are visible even after careful conservation treatment? That much damage is caused to floors by the sheer number (and type) of shoes walking across our heritage sites? That light causes irreversible damage to pigments and materials which even the best conservator cannot repair?

This is where preventive conservation, the pre-emptive care of collections, comes in. We know the mechanisms causing damage to objects. The challenge for heritage organisations is therefore more than simply fixing objects when things go wrong – instead, the focus now is on ensuring that as little damage as possible happens in the first place.

This means undertaking dust surveys to set up cleaning management plans; risk assessing collections for the presence of mould and managing the store/display environment accordingly; spot checking collections for pest damage and monitoring the occurrence and movements of pests around the museum; monitoring and adjusting light levels to avoid sensitive objects being over exposed.

For many years the advice was to wear cotton gloves when handling paper. But libraries and archives found that much damage was done to sensitive documents through the use of cotton gloves, which reduce manual dexterity, allow sweat and oils through from the skin and can snag on paper. So the advice now is to use either vinyl gloves or none at all – providing your hands are clean and free from grease.

Looking after the nation’s heritage takes more than locking objects in a store and hoping for the best. The proper care of collections requires much knowledge and experience; constant training to keep up to date with the latest research forms part of that.

Find out more about care of collections at Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales here.