Conservation of mother-of-pearl lacquerware

the conservation of Korean mother / has not been well developed nor studied outside of Korea it is exciting that the exhibition presents the conservation process of for mother of pearl lacquers from the asian art museum collection so the goals in our conservation process were threefold first perform extensive analysis and examination of the objects here we wanted to add to the body of knowledge about late choson dynasty Korean lacquer where there isn't much out there and we wanted to help inform our treatment steps to this end we started out by analyzing each piece visually so the objects in our study here involved lacquer ray skin mother pearl tortoiseshell metal wires and metal flakes on each object this table has a number of large cracks running through it which are going to give us the opportunity to take some nice samples with a cross-section sample we can prepare it and put under the microscope and see the different layers of the surface we're examining the cross-section we want to be able to distinguish between original material and anything that was added after the object was made the thick yellow layer appears to be original and I think was probably put on there to keep the wires shiny the layer over that is some later coding we wouldn't mind removing that layer coating especially if it's interfering with the look of the object now but before we removed anything we'd have to think very carefully about why it's there what it's doing to to the appearance of the object because you want the object to look as much like it did originally as possible in addition to looking at the object under normal life we always look at them under ultraviolet radiation so this swath of light green is unexpected it is a different coating from the rest of the surface this means possibly a repair campaign along this crack now that we've looked at this table with visible light UV light and under the microscope we're interested to see more details about how it was constructed and for that we're going to use x-rays we can see most of the nails are coming from the top down but then this nail was put in from the bottom up and is probably a repair the snail also is coming in from the end and probably is not original this is the x-ray fluorescence spectrometer or XRF we use it to identify the elements in the object here we're looking at this squiggly wire on the screen because we're interested to know whether it's gold which it looks like or whether it's maybe gilded brass copper bronze whatever takes about a minute it's not gold wire it's Cochran think there is some gold involved here it looks like possibly that wire might have a spine gold plating on it and that pretty much covers it so second goal was to stabilize the object so there wasn't quite a lot of lifting inlay materials of lifting lacquer lifting wire lifting mother-of-pearl lifting ray skin the idea being that once those are secured the object can be exhibited safely and stored safely without further risk of loss the final goal was to make aesthetic compensations for losses in inlay materials and the lacquer we wanted the overall pattern to be legible again and not distracting at all to the viewer in general in conservation when we're making replacement parts we like to make them reversible because it could well be that in the future someone will come up with a better answer the other thing that we want to make sure of is that the the materials that we use for replacement parts are readily identifiable as such and while they should not be obvious from any distance close up if you know what you're looking for you should be able to tell which parts original and which parts are replacements so that scholars in the future for example won't be fooled by our work and take it to be original the treatments of the four objects were actually fairly similar for several of the inlay material so to come up with creative fills so for example of the horn I used thick mylar so i'm not using an original horn material but something that looks very much like it then another recently developed technique was to create fills for lacquer using cast pieces of acrylic film we're using acrylic paint match to the color of the loss then once it dries get this nice flexible piece that you can then cut to the shape of your long supply sit in there and then you have a removable fill they were pre-existing fills around some of the top surface of the round table but they were lacking the small golden flakes that the rest of the surface house so we put a little adhesive on each of those areas and then we're using a piece of bamboo tube with a very fine net put over the end to disperse very fine golden mica powder onto the adhesive so to make a match with the original so the most challenging aspect of the process was to create a film material for the Ray skin losses and this was big problem because each area of Los had different scale size subtle differences in color plus texture and it was incredibly thin so what to put in place here we first decided that using more race skin was probably not a good idea because of its lack of availability but also because you don't want to use a material which can be mistaken for the original then of course the Ray skin is not just a flat blank color and you've got these circles which represent the knobs on the surface of the skin when we thought about that we realized that the best way to reproduce that texture was to use some kind of a circular punch to press circles into the paper we remembered that in the closet we had some very old glass syringes and needles from 40 50 years ago so the perfect tool to impress these little dots on the paper it's a good thing we saved them for these 50 years isn't it I ended up using the metal syringe tips with different diameter to create the circular scales outlining those with a pen then adding some gloss adhering this in place and then burnishing it further to enhance the gloss it's pretty common in conservation that we find tools from other areas that we use not a lot of tools are made specifically for conservation and you have nice needs for some odd little thing that you just have to fish around and find the right object to do the job the other technique that was slightly unusual was to use the wax resin to fill hairline cracks in the lacquer losses wax resin fills are typically used in paintings conservation so to use them here in an object is slightly different but a good choice for filling this very tiny crack in order to replace the lost wire we purchased new wire from the hardware store and then I bent it to match the shape and then adhered it in place and then had to tone it so that it didn't look like new wire when the 12-sided table one leg was missing a foot so I took him old of an existing foot then cast a new foot carved it down to fit exactly and then adhered it in place and painted it to match and then once all that replacement parts were put on it was mainly a matter of toning all those replacement bit so that they matched visually and then bringing up the gloss doing a little bit of polishing cleaning to get them to look as good as they could well it's always rewarding when you're finished with the treatment to step back and see how much better the piece looks afterwards than before but in fact i really enjoy the analysis i like looking at the objects and examine them closely to figure out what they're made of and how they're made that somehow gives me the feeling that i have some kind of view into the eye and the mind of the craftsman who made it originally you you