Conservation professionals often fly under the radar due to the nature of our work—our work in museums, for example, is typically considered successful if you don’t notice it or think about it. Ask a Conservator Day is a chance for us to raise awareness and celebrate the work that we do while exchanging information and fun stories with our colleagues around the world.
For this year’s Ask a Conservator Day, our Department hosted a Daily Dig at the Museum to discuss some of our work to prepare for our new Ancient Egypt and Nubia galleries. In this article, we’re sharing some of the questions we received.
We often hear the word “conservation.” Is that what conservators do?
The American Institute for Conservation (AIC) website describes conservation as encompassing all actions taken toward the long-term preservation of cultural heritage. Conservators are professionals who do this work, which includes examination, documentation, treatment, and preventive care, as well as research, education, and training.
How often do conservators do their work inside the Penn Museum galleries? Or, does most of the work happen someplace else?
Our Conservation Department staff works in the galleries on a weekly basis. This work includes ongoing preventive care through gallery maintenance activities, environmental monitoring, and maintaining the passive environmental controls in some of our display cases. We also rotate light-sensitive objects. Our main workspaces, however, are outside of the galleries in our conservation lab spaces and at our off-site Conservation Lab Annex (CLA).
What kind of materials do you use when cleaning objects?
We use all sorts of materials, from cotton swabs, bamboo skewers, and scalpels, to solvents such as ethanol and acetone, as well as custom-made gel solutions. We do extensive testing before any cleaning, because cleaning is an irreversible process.
When thinking about how to display a partially damaged or incomplete object, how much of the original material do you need to have, and how much can you create to fill in the blanks?
It depends on the object and the goals for display and interpretation. The less original material we have, the less we know about what the object originally looked like, and the more new material we need to add to make it look whole again (we call these new additions “fills”).
For objects that are missing more than half their original material, we have to have a serious discussion with the curators and our exhibits team to talk about how much work it will entail, if we even know what the object would have originally looked like, and how we might achieve the reconstruction.
If it is acceptable to only display the fragments, or fragment groupings, we would want to consider that as well. We generally do not add new material if we don’t know what the missing area looked like.
Is the goal to disguise the fills you add or to have them be evident to the naked eye?
Again, it depends! As a museum with a focus on archaeological and anthropological collections, the objects we work on often come to the lab with a significant amount of damage, loss, and evidence of use. These objects were not acquired when they were brand new and they were not made to be displayed in a museum, so our goal is not to make the objects look new.
When we add fills to objects, we often aim to disguise them enough so that visitors won’t be distracted by this new material and instead see the original object. But we also don’t want to misrepresent these objects. We sometimes loosely refer to a six feet, six inches rule: at six feet, you might not notice the new fill material, but at six inches it becomes clear what is original and what is new.
This is, of course, somewhat subjective, and so we make our decisions based on input from our colleagues in conservation and our curators and other collections staff. Our approach also always depends on the object, how much fill we are adding, and so on. We are more likely to disguise a small fill and less likely to work hard to disguise a very large loss on an object.
When you’re painting over missing areas, how do you know what to paint?
We make decisions about how to “inpaint” (adding color and design to fills) based on observations and research, and discussions with our curators, our exhibitions team, and with our colleagues in conservation. Sometimes, such as with objects with a repeating pattern, it is really obvious, and then the question becomes not how do we know what to paint, but what is an acceptable approach, reproducing this pattern or just painting a neutral color so that the fill is obvious? We do not paint in details if we don’t know for sure what those details originally looked like. It is also really important for us to point out that we never paint over original material, just over the new fills that we add.
We have spoken to many Museum visitors who really like it when it is obvious what is original and what is not, and we think about these things when we make these decisions. So now it is our turn to ask you—what do you think about this topic? Next time you’re in this Museum or another, keep your eyes peeled for fills and inpainting—you might see a wide variety of approaches.
Keep in mind that some of this work may have happened a long time ago (in some cases, over a century ago!) and like all things, trends and approaches change over time. But you can be sure that for many of these objects, a lot of thought and research went into their conservation treatment.
What is the ratio of time for researching and documentation, compared to physical treatment?
It’s about half and half. Some objects only require documentation and no treatment, while for others, treatment may take months or years, so that changes the ratio.
What advice would you give to people interested in pursuing conservation?
Try to get in contact with people in the field and other people pursuing conservation. Conservation professionals are a friendly bunch and many people will be happy to have a conversation over email, on the phone, or in person about the nature of the work and to provide suggestions. One place to start is AIC’s network of Emerging Conservation Professionals—their webpage has amazing resources, links to getting involved, and to learn more about pathways into the field.
To learn more about Conservation at the Penn Museum, check out our Day in the Life reel and stay tuned to the Penn Museum Voices blog.
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