Excuse me, do you know what goes on in this building?
Is it a fire station?
It used to be the old Council buildings, didn't it?
It used to be a fire station.
I'll go and ask the town surveyor, he'll tell you. [Laughs]
Here at the Conservation Centre, we are working to prolong the life of all the collections
held in trust by the National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside.
In the sculpture studio, the work varies from cleaning and restoring
sculptures of all kinds to making brand new replicas.
‘The Spirit of Liverpool’ was rescued after 120 years on the roof of the Walker Art Gallery
and is now in the foyer of the Centre. An exact copy is being made to replace it.
If you look at the building, the building is not terribly decayed, the sculpture is.
It is quite clear, and we know from the records, that the sculpture on the roof
was a major part of the cost of the building. Therefore, it was always a vital element.
Now if you take off the sculpture and say OK it’s decayed, we'll just take it away,
you’re left with something which has lost a lot of its significance.
Now if you put back the sculpture, then you are re-establishing the whole intention of the original building.
So, in a sense, that’s what we’re doing. We are looking at.
If the building itself was like a, say a ruined monastery, it would be very different, we'd take a different approach.
Here we have got a building that's in pretty good condition, very much as it was intended to be seen,
but the sculpture has deteriorated far more rapidly than the rest of the building.
This dinghy is a replica of one built locally in Rock Ferry in 1935.
The original was considered too precious to return to the water.
The original boat is quite sound, there was some attack at some stage when it was with its original owner,
there was some woodworm effect, attack we have treated, it hasn’t affected the structure.
There is a general view, that wooden boats should really be used in the water all the time,
even ones in museums, which I can understand in some people
But our business is really to preserve unique or very special craft on the longer term
and if you use it on the water, you are, in a sense, putting it at risk.
Wooden boats, I think, in particular, have a uniqueness about them in that each one,
even if you get the same craftsman to build six of the same boats, each one will be different than the other.
There will be a difference in, simply because of the materials involved,
the way they are shaped, put into place. So there is a uniqueness about them.
Boat builders fortunately, or unfortunately depending on which way you look at it,
are becoming scarcer.And to some degree too,
the very process of building the boat in its original form and style is helping
to preserve the original and it's helping to record the skills involved
with it and to keep them going.
Most conservation work does not, however, require such wholesale changes.
We're less inclined to make decisions about doing major interventions and treatments
whereas, a few years ago perhaps where there would be very little concern about
decisions to line or realine pictures. We don't take those sorts of decisions
anywhere near so lightly these days. We're much more likely to do nothing and to
monitor something than we are actually to intervene and where we do intervene
we try to make that as minimal as possible.
We like to remain with the same materials that the artists use as far as possible.
We would use pigments and media that are stable and that are light fast.
In instances where the artist has used pigments or media that aren't light
fast, or that age more quickly, then perhaps some others then we will try to
use a similar alternative.
Sometimes an ordinary object has special significance, a lifejacket from the Titanic for example.
I'm going to do very little with the life jacket it's going
on display in the Maritime Museum, I'm going to surface clean it with a vacuum cleaner.
But I'm not going to try and clean it further. I think in a case
like this, the actual soiling on the objects part of its interests.
Conservators are deciding how to treat these master drawings from the
Weld Blundell collection before they go on exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery.
This drawing is 16th century drawing by Tintoretto and it has various problems,
there is a very large missing area in the top left hand corner, there are
stains such as here, it's a very large stain, with a loss in the paper as well.
We would like to interfere with the drawing as it were to a very minimal extent.
What we have decided to do is to simply tidy up the old repair to make it
look aesthetically more acceptable. And so that when one views the drawing
itself, one's eye isn't is not led up into that corner.
This early 17th century drawing by Rubens, which also
has a very large repair in the lower left
hand corner. The texture does not quite marry up to the texture of the drawing
paper, but it is similar enough for us to be able to tone it down in colour
and reduce the texture so that it it will look much more acceptable.
So should we be able to see the actual repair work on objects when it’s on display?
Conservators sometimes use a simple guideline to help with this.
The '6 foot 6 inch' rule means, we don't specifically get a tape measure out and sort of judge
this accurately, but six inches meaning, if you get close to an object
it's obvious where its repair is. On viewing it from a sort of the distance
of a case the way you would look in a showcase, or at an object to view it if
you were in a gallery, what we're saying is the treatment should not be obvious.
This painting of Dante and Beatrice by Henry Holliday was once severely damaged.
In fact the damage was so serious that it changed the way we transport works of art.
In 1966 temperature and humidity changes during a flight to Rome
caused the canvas to shrink and the paint to peel from the surface.
Painstaking work by Italian conservators means that the painting can once again be enjoyed
in the Walker Art Gallery.
We're now able to send even quite delicate paintings abroad.
This German painting by Karl Gussow is on a wooden panel. Timber warps easily when the
humidity changes and in the past it would have been unthinkable to have
loaned it out for exhibition. The conservators are installing the painting
in a microclimate box, which will keep it in a stable environment and ensure it's
fully protected. An indicator sealed in the box allows conditions to be
constantly monitored. The Kingston brooch is also being prepared for travel to
another museum, it's one of the most celebrated pieces in our collection.
It's an Anglo-Saxon brooch dating from the 7th century and the surface
decoration is made up of lots of gold filigree work and also cut garnets which
inlaid into these gold cells and there must be getting on for a hundred garnets
in the brooch. And when I came to check it to see if it was fit to travel, I
discovered that a few of them had worked loose in their cells, so before it could
go out on loan, it was necessary to consolidate some of the garnets into
their cells by adding some acrylic resin to hold them in place.
Museum objects must be handle carefully when on the move,
but they can also be under threat when standing still.
Vulnerable objects, such as furniture on open
display, have to be carefully monitored. Measures are taken to keep the
temperature and humidity stable throughout the gallery to prevent damage
like this from occurring. This split in an 18th century English commode will be
repaired by the furniture conservators. Light levels can also cause problems.
The best solution to preserving textiles is to keep the light levels very low, and
although it is harder for visitors to see them, I think if you have the right
conditions so that you walk through progressively darker areas, your eyes
will actually adapt to dark conditions.
These are 2 painted silk embroideries
from the Lady Lever Art Gallery. There's a large collection of early English
embroidery in the gallery, and a lot of it's in quite bad condition because it's
being displayed for a long time in very high light levels. If we kept them on
display in bright conditions they'd be destroyed completely.
Sometimes the actual material used can be unstable, as in this 17th century drawing by Guercino.
It's in an ink called iron gall ink. It is very acidic by nature, and it can
become so acidic that it will deteriorate the paper to such an extent
that the paper can break down completely in those areas.
To a few areas here, this has
actually happened and the paper has dropped away from those areas.
The spots are fly droppings, which we very often find on paper, so one of the jobs we have
with this drawing is to remove the accretion and to draw out the stain
Statues in our cities are also suffering but it's pollution from traffic and
industry causing the damage.
The problem is that pollution,
although the statistics, in a way, try to say that it's getting better,
most of us who worked with sculptures outdoors know that in fact things are
deteriorating as quickly now as they ever have and if not, quicker, and our
problem is that we have to try and find better techniques for cleaning and
treating the sculptures, which is partly why we've developed the laser technology
we're using, because we're trying to find more effective ways of cleaning things.
But the same time, creating far less damage to those objects whilst we're
treating them.
Not all treatments are so futuristic; conservators sometimes make use of more traditional methods.
traditional methods the Japanese swords have almost a mirror finish on parts of
the blade and and wonderful so satin finishes and other parts the iron
corrosion on the blades in the past advice was going around that you should
remove it using a bit of pin and actually scrape the iron corrosion off
the surface of the blade we use traditional Japanese techniques for
caring for the blades which employs the use of a very fine abrasive powder
that's wiped along with the blade with mulberry paper and the blades are then
protected with a very fine layer of glue
we often want to discover what lies beneath the surface and modern
technology can help with this detective work John Millay changed his mind many
times before settling on this version of his famous painting tsarism brass at the
forge from the lady levar art gallery x-rays helped tell the story
during his endless changes the actual figure group in the center doesn't
appear to have been altered very much except for the actual leg of the night
as the horse got bigger and then smaller he Millie actually adjusted the actual
length and there is actually an image clearly shown by the x-ray DX radiograph
of a foot that ends about here and we can see a spur at a heart at a higher
position the painting changed has numerous times in the latter half of the
19th century and was finally purchased by a mr. Benson in the late 1880s in
1892 that's only four years before Millie's death he actually asked Millay
to make yet more changes to the to the horse most particular to elaborate upon
the strapping hear the bells and leatherwork office of the of the horse
here and also the cropper and these details at the end I'm hoping that all
the documentation I leave behind in terms of sorting out the order of events
that Millie went through will be regret helped the next restorer because it's
actually taken phenomenal amount of time to get that sorted out in contrast to
this research work devoted to just one painting paper conservators are faced
with treating and restoring 200,000 negatives in the Stewart Bale
photographic collection acquired in 1986 Edward Stuart Bale wasn't satisfied with
the quality of results he was getting so he decided to found his own company and
exactly very high standards from his staff
each negative has to be removed from its original storage box surface cleaned and
repaired if necessary its then rehoused in acid-free folders inside metal
storage cabinets this work will ensure that a unique photographic record of the
city of Liverpool is preserved for the future
conservation work always involves careful judgment but when it finally
comes to starting work on the object does the conservator need to take a deep
breath yes always take a deep breath so it's a matter of respect for the object
well you do yes you do because you know that it's unique why don't you actually
sort of really get up close you start seeing the brushstrokes you really get
to feel the effort and the strain in a sense and anxiety the artist has put put
into actually conceiving the work and with something like this where me lay
struggled and struggled and struggled I mean it is quite extraordinary