Alligators, ducks, fish and foxes...

Art conservation is an extremely interesting field. When I started volunteering, I never expected to be involved in this side of things, but then the conservator’s volunteer dropped out and I ended up being ‘shared’ between the archivists and the conservator. At that time I mostly helped move things, cut paper and made folders; in this new job I’m actually involved in assessing the condition of items, rating them with regard to urgency of attention needed and describing any damage.

A large table, well-padded, is set up for me in the L-shaped room or the art store, wherever I am working. I don my latex gloves, and a mask if there’s mould or a lot of dust. I take an art object over to the table and work through my checklist. First of all, what is this?! I’ve done some reading on different types of print, photographs and so on, yet still the answer is not always clear (sometimes the conservator doesn’t know either!). For example, I’ve had some items on which well-meaning people have stuck labels that completely misinform me as to the medium. I’ve also had to deal with some photographs of drawings and paintings, which can be very confusing – is this a print? Or a photo of a drawing…? And so on.

Moving on, can I spot any damage to the item, such as scuffing, cockling of the support or bits missing (‘losses’)? How is the object mounted – if on board, is this acid-free? Is there any dirt and, if so, is it on the item or just the glass in its frame? Or, if an old photograph, you come up against that crucial yet bewildering question: ‘Is this discoloured or did it always look like that?’

If the item is framed, is this the original frame and if not, do we really need it? If not, it’s time to get the pliers out, goggles on and pull out nails or do whatever necessary to get the backing off – often revealing that someone has stuck the object to its mount with sticky tape – aaagh!

If paper is involved, I try to ascertain what might have caused any ominous grubby marks. If an acidic mount, such as wood or most types of board, has been used, the paper usually has brown lines or other marks on it because the acid literally burns the paper over time. Some artworks I’ve seen have been in frames with a wood backing, which stains the entire back of the object brown. Another very common thing with paper is ‘foxing’: those small brown stains that form over the surface. These are caused by metal impurities in the paper, which corrode. I’ve had one instance of suspected mould – some kind of liquid was dropped on the object’s surface and the mould was attracted to the liquid. I had to deframe the item straight away and put it aside for special treatment. If anyone reading this has anything precious on paper – please keep it somewhere dry!

Oil paintings are very often cracked all over, or can have rips and tears or are slack on their stretchers. Though these don’t often have frames, I’ve found a small painting of Walter Scott in the art store, with an exquisitely ornate, art deco-style wooden frame. The frame is gorgeous but so fragile, with losses and bits hanging off it, that I hardly dare touch it. Alarmingly, it’s hanging on a rack and I’m dying to get it into a box where it’s safe!

Just enough time to tell you some of the idiosyncratic, often funny vocabulary that you’re supposed to use when describing  artworks and any damage. Here are some of my favourite terms:

Alligatoring: extreme shrinkage cracking in paint that resembles alligator skin

Cotton Duck: a white cotton canvas used from 1920’s

Fishtail crack: an age crack that looks like a fish tail – often in the corner of an oil painting

Craqueleure: another name for age cracking

Pentimenti: Where a paint layer has become transparent, revealing what is below

Blind Cleavage: described in my glossary as ‘areas of cleavage that are difficult to see’.  (Cleavage is where paint has lost adhesion to its ground – of course!!)

Plenty of fun to be had, then, but plenty of work…

So what's it all about?

Life in Special Collections, as I’ve come to understand it, goes something like this. Collections come in to us (or items are added to collections) when they are either donated, or (less often) bought using trust fund money. Collections relating to a prominent person are often donated by a family member if the person has died, or if still alive, they or someone in their office sends more to us every so often to add to the collection. The first project I volunteered on was sorting through press cuttings from Melvyn Bragg’s office; I was told that ‘every so often he clears out his drawers and sends it all in’.

There needs to be a process whereby all the exciting old stuff is legally handed over to the university library and its details clocked onto the system; this is called accessioning and is one of my line manager’s responsibilities. Ideally, what would happen next is that the material would be examined, surveyed and catalogued straight away so that everyone, including library users, knows what’s there and can access it. In the real world, things work much more slowly, and items have to be left – and often moved multiple times! – until a staff member is able to work through boxes, examine the condition of the contents and do any repackaging necessary so that they can be safely preserved and handled. This is why I never ran out of volunteer work last summer, and why, indeed, volunteers are so valued at the Brotherton. Absolutely nothing bored me as a volunteer (well, apart from clearing out the map drawers…) because the work often involved looking through boxes of items that none of the staff had laid eyes on. Often we are sent lists of what has been deposited, but these are often more of a summary. The most exciting moment for me was when I was sorting some papers belonging to the poet and playwright Tony Harrison and was told, ‘There’s a letter from Laurence Olivier somewhere in there’. I did find it, though unfortunately Olivier hadn’t signed it, just squiggled! Pah.

Now, in the L-shaped room, I’m going a step further and am doing a proper survey of art objects. I was allowed to design my own survey sheet, to help me record as quickly and efficiently as possible the information that needs to go on record. I based it on existing survey sheets they use in Special Collections and am now using it to work my way through all the prints, photographs, plans and seventies multimedia collages (yes, really) that are standing upended between bookshelves in the L-shaped room. After a slow start in which I messed about with spacing several times, I feel I’ve now cracked it and am using it with a bit more ease. I’m including a condition report on the sheet also, with a diagram box to help me depict all those nasty cracks, stains and acid burns that I’m slowly getting used to picking out and recognising.

Next time: the delights of deframing, and what exactly is a cotton duck??

My first week!

I'm a week into my new internship. Last week I worked Monday to Thursday, learned a huge amount, which I'm still processing, fluctuated between scared and excited/intrigued, and crashed out at the end of the week... This week looks to be no different, but what's for certain is that I'm very lucky to have this internship; it's extremely interesting work that will allow me experience of many and varied duties (and should be enjoyable too!). I'll explain the bare bones of what I'm doing, and fill in any gaps later.

Special Collections in Leeds University Brotherton Library is a major literary archive for West Yorkshire, holding many prominent collections including a large WW1 and 2 collection, Ripon Cathedral library, and the papers of major literary figures with a Yorkshire connection, such as the Bronte family, Arthur Ransome, Melvyn Bragg and Tony Harrison (to name just a few)... There are also some quite random specialist collections, such as a large antique cookery book collection, and it's a repository for some local organisations too. I volunteered there for two months last summer, mostly packing and stacking and helping the conservator here and there, and enjoyed it so much that I continued to volunteer when I returned to the university to study in the autumn. This led to my being selected for this internship.

Many works of art (mostly paintings, drawings and prints) exist within the archival collections and these need to be identified and their details filled in or expanded upon in the library catalogue. Some are upstairs in Special Collections, in a back room known as the L-shaped room; some are being held in the uni art gallery store, under appropriate conditions for preservation; and I'm sure there are many others sneakily hiding in archival boxes in the stacks, but I'll be addressing those later if ever! Also, some will need deframing and restoration/preservation work, and I'll be identifying where this is necessary and helping with it where needed. So really my job will involve both archiving and conservation skills, and hopefully give me a good basic grounding in both.

Where to begin with what I've learned so far? Last week I had various meetings both with my line manager and with other people, either to go through admin stuff, risk assessment etc, or receive training. I got shown round the stacks, so that I finally know everything we have and where it is (or could work it out at least!!). I can now find my way around the art gallery store, in the basement of the Parkinson Building, including locking up procedures and the scary burglar alarm. I had training in the rather complicated software KE EMu, which is used in the archives and art gallery for cataloguing - I had to start using it after an hour's tutorial, aaagh! - but somehow I managed! Just to make things complicated, the art gallery and the archives each use EMu in a slightly different way, and I had to learn both, because I will have to make either kind of record depending on where the art objects are kept. I've learnt how to make or add to art gallery records, but the Special Collections records from the L-shaped room stuff are yet to come.

Then, I spent this morning with the conservator, learning about how to report on the condition of an art object. She is incredibly skilled and can pick out all different kinds of damage and diagnose what caused it! I'll tell you more about what's involved with this at a later time.

So now I'm starting to go through the artworks that belong to Special Collections but are being kept in the gallery store. I've had a look at some of them and already found some treasures, which, again, I'll describe in a later post! I hope all this has made sense to anybody reading this. I'll sign off now, as I need to get some sleep in time for tomorrow!