Hi welcome back.
It's episode five of Conserving the Sherborne cartonnage…
yes yes yes we are still going.
I don't really have a role in this episode it's just um we've set the convention now
we have to keep it going.
But anyway so here I am um I’m just going to hand you straight over to the thing that
I know you've all been waiting for which is repairs with Barbara.
My name's Barbara Wills and I’ve been working with Verena on the conservation of the Sherborne
cartonnage and this is repairs with Barbara.
It has been a challenge.
And as with all those objects that are challenges it doesn't come with its own instruction manual
on how to reshape how to repair.
So to begin with it's a very frustrating part of work trying to find out what's the best
consolidant, what's the best adhesive, what's the best technique.
But the joy is that Verena is very creative in the way she approaches conservation and
she's made the most wonderful devices that help clamp or support or stretch.
If you look at the table here you will see a whole range of consolidants and adhesives
and props and clamps and weights that we've used with Sherbi.
And because he's got lots of curves and they're quite subtle curves and as you know he was
very very distorted and we've spent a long time opening him out and trying to regain
his original shape.
When we are reshaping we allow the object itself to open up and come together in a way
that dictates its own shape.
It's not that you're looking for a perfect shape you're looking for it to reveal its
own shape.
Sherbi was also unique in the fragility of its surface fragile in so many different ways
firstly the blue pigment, the ancient Egyptian blue frit it's what we would call friable.
And it will flake off and it needs a lot of strength especially as we're trying to reshape
him Sorry I keep on calling him he's got such a quality of identity that we can't help but
call him ‘him’.
So we've looked for a lot of different consolidants in order to consolidate not just the blue
frit but also the other pigments and as conservators tend to do, we do our tests and we start gently.
Less is best.
So we started with Funori which comes from a seaweed.
Methocel, there's another one called e-h-e-c e-heck, ethyl hydroxy ethyl cellulose and
in a variety of different solvents.
Different solvents give different qualities to the consolidant and actually to begin with
I did consolidate the gold of the face with a Klucel which is a hydroxypropyl cellulose
ether.
I used firstly Klucel e very gentle it seemed to work but when I returned to it a week later
it hadn't done the job.
It hadn't stuck down those little friable fragments that really needed to be held in
place otherwise you couldn't go any further with him.
So in the end we used quite a robust consolidant it's called Klucel G. Again from the family
of cellulose ethers.
And in the right solvent it worked and it worked in the sense that it stuck it together,
consolidated it.
And it worked in the sense that it did not change the colour.
And the other consolidant that we used was Paraloid b-72.
This is the way we went with the whole of the surface upper lid of Sherbi.
He needed consolidation everywhere.
Now having consolidated the lid that means we can now go in and we can reshape and we
can repair.
We're reshaping using humidity and there's a number of ways you can introduce humidity
into a surface.
It has to be water vapour.
And how do we introduce the water vapour?
And essentially one of the ways that I’m using is blotting paper.
We have our gently dampened blotting paper, we place it within our Gore-Tex sleeve and
then the Gore-Tex gently regulates the release of the water vapor into the adjacent area.
And then this whole area, you'll have one at the front one at the back, and the whole
area will be covered with polythene, and that'll create your micro climate with a high relative
humidity and that's what we want.
After 40 minutes and an hour you can usually expect it to gently respond.
So this is where you can either straighten it out and clamp it, or this might be the
time when you also make a repair.
And this is where we will be using paper.
The one that I’ve been using the Kozo Japanese long fibered paper, that derives from the
paper mulberry tree.
And this when you've used the Klucel G on the paper you paint it with the Klucel.
Imagine a sandwich with peanut butter in between and that sticks both of the layers of bread.
And you need that because if your adhesive is actually within the paper it means it's
not floating loosely on the uneven surfaces of the layers of the cartonnage it means that
it's encapsulated within the paper
So most of the paper remains in place and now I’ll apply the clamp.
And that will apply gentle pressure until it sets.
And talking about clamps, we've got a lot of clamps.
There are so many different ways of clamping because here we are trying to regain Sherbi's
original configuration.
And in the perfect world you would use your hands, but the thing is you cannot stay with
your hands in exactly the right place for the next 48 hours, so you need the clamps
to do the job for you.
But often you have to alter them.
You see this only offers you just one particular way of clamping together and we need a very
three-dimensional way of clamping together.
So this is again this is where we use bespoke methods.
We have to create our own clamps.
We have to push something into shape we have to pull something out of shape, we have to
pull upwards, we have to press downwards.
And there are so many different ways of doing it.
I mean a lot of it is it's quite difficult to vocalize because it's unconscious you know
it's just what you do you know you just have an instinctive sense of well this is obviously
what one would do because you haven't even thought it through you just thought that has
to go like that so that that can go like that and once it's like that then you hold it like
that, but you can't hold it straight you have to hold it on a curve how do you create a
curve?
How do you pad it?
It's almost instinctive once you've done it a few times.
After months of work on lid and base both parts are now finally stable enough so that
we can turn them over.
This is quite a big deal for me personally anyway first of all turning over an object
of that size and fragility is a risky process.
It will become clear very quickly whether our repairs were sufficiently strong, and
the method we've chosen to flip both parts are safe for the object.
Secondly thinking of the base we will be able to see whether I managed to join the three
sections neatly and whether I’ve got the alignment right.
Also for the first time we will have a chance to see the interior of the lid properly.
The cartonnage is very flexible so we need rigid supports for both lid and base in order
to flip them safely.
For the base we've created a support which we will also be using for display of the object
in the gallery, and at this stage we need to develop a fairly clear idea what the final
display mount should look like.
We decided to go for what we call a buckram mount.
For this we are using fabric strips soaked in wheat starch which we will then paste in
several layers over a former made of foam.
And once dry we will actually have a fairly rigid structure which is not too dissimilar
from the original object.
For the lid we are using a temporary support structure.
It has taken us quite a while to arrive at this design.
Initially I was very much thinking along the lines of yes we will reshape the lid until
we found what we think is the original shape and then encase it in a rigid shell to stabilize
sufficiently to flip it over.
In the last week or so I came more or less to the conclusion that actually for the final
steps of the reshaping treatment it would be really helpful if we were to have continued
access to both the interior and exterior surface.
We considered quite a lot of different techniques and options how we could build the structure.
We were thinking of 3D printed supports based on a 3D scan of the object.
And then we thought we could do something interesting with a piece of coated mesh or
wire or combine all of these!
But in the end we went for something quite straightforward.
A wooden frame with cardboard arches.
At the moment it all feels very nice and secure when I lift it off, but yeah in a few minutes
we're going to turn it over so fingers crossed that it will all work as planned.
I’m a bit nervous but also very excited!
Now we all know that if you want to find out how to do anything in the world you go to
YouTube, you put your search term in and you'll find a video with some 10 year old probably,
telling you exactly how to do the thing that you want to do whether it's bleeding your
radiators making a pair of trousers or whatever the case may be.
But up until very recently if you'd put in “how do I fix my cartonnage?”
you would have come up a blank, but now you've got five episodes going into great detail
on how to fix your cartonnage!
Thank me later
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