By Leonor Mozo Alonso, Conservation Student Placement
As a conservation student at RAMM, I have the great luck to work on a wide variety of objects and materials. Here are a few examples of what I’ve been up to in the last few months.
During the weeks leading up to the exhibition In Plain Sight, we prepared the chosen objects for display making sure that they looked as good as possible. I worked on an African war drum cleaning a small area of the surface with saliva (spit) applied with cotton swabs to make the writing that was added at a later stage in this country legible. Strange as it may sound, saliva is commonly used in conservation as a cleaning agent, because it contains enzymes that can break down dirt quite easily, which makes it very effective. It is also not as liquid as other solvents, so it is easier to control. However, the surface will need rinsing afterwards.
From a student perspective, it was a fantastic experience to be involved in the installation of a temporary exhibition and get a taster of the role each member of the museum plays in it. My take from this experience is that there is nothing more difficult to display than textiles, which seem to constantly crease and fall in ways we do not want them to.
After the exhibition was installed, I started working on other projects such as the vacuuming of a birch bark canoe and the topping up of fluid preserved specimens. The fluid inside the jars, which is commonly either formaldehyde or a mix of water and ethanol, evaporates with time as it is difficult to achieve a completely tight seal. It is essential to top them up with fluid again, so that the specimens are preserved and don’t dry out. Resealing the jars with a gelatine adhesive after they had been topped up proved to be a much more difficult task than I thought and demonstrated why it was such a challenge to achieve a tight seal and stop evaporation!
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