The V&A is an utterly gorgeous museum. There's such a wide range of stuff - renaissance sculpture, Victorian architecture and loads of modern art. As befits a museum of fantastic design, the whole feel is that of a design student's scrapbook made 3D.
What really interested me about today was going to see the conservation labs and talking to the scientists who work with the V&A. (We also got to see the Surrealism exhibition being dismantled, which was awesome).
Everything will decay over time, organic materials more quickly than inorganic materials. Interestingly, many modern synthetic materials decay fastest of all. Sandra Smith, head of conservation, talked about the problems in conserving modern materials designed to be biodegradable, something that had never occurred to me.
Every decision about conservation has to be VERY carefully researched before anything can be done. The last thing you want to do is to damage the very object you're trying to protect (a lot of modern conservation work involves removing varnishes and over-painting done as part of failed conservation work in the past). Forensic analysis is also often used to determine the age of objects and where they originated from.
Insects are also a much bigger problem than I had ever realised: people kept talking about pest traps and the dangers that feathers and bed bugs can pose to objects.
I think working down in the labs would be a lot of fun and great experience (labs!).
The BM tomorrow.
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2 comments:
A surrealism exhibition dismantled eh? If, like, y'know, THAT, was the exhibition then like, y'know, that'd be really profound and stuff.
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