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Mounting batik textiles

Denise Migdail, Textile Conservator at the Asian Art Museum, explains how she prepared batik textiles to be mounted for display using magnets. Learn more about art conservation at the Asian Art Museum's Conservation Center. Created by Asian Art Museum.

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  • leaf orange style avatar for user Jeff Kelman
    I noticed that the textile is being hung from left to right or parallel with the floor. Wouldn't it put less strain and thus be advantageous for the textile to hang vertically or perpendicularly to the floor?
    (3 votes)
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Video transcript

today we're looking at fatigues that are going up in our gallery for the batik show and looking at how we're mounting them the designer wanted floating textiles where you really don't see the mounts at all and some of the problems that you could encounter is how to suspend these textiles seemingly in midair for the narrow ones such as the sash we came up with the idea of magnets on the front and then how do you hide the magnet so you don't just see glaring badness and one technique that we're using for three pieces in the show is photos taken to scale that will then be adhered to flexible magnets so we have our flexible magnet bars and the metal tape receiver the metal goes directly onto our support for then the photo is cut and adhered directly to the Bandit bar then you can we can place the textile on the mylar overlay so it's not in touch direct contact with the metals and you place the textile on the metal will place the magnet over the textile and the textile will be completely supported across the width and the magnet will be hidden by the photo so here is essentially a cross-section of the mount it is not drawn to scale but you can see from the different colors all the different layers involved in the mounting process so it's essential to use polyester film or mylar on both sides of the textile isolating it from all materials such as the magnetic tape the metal receiver and any adhesive this protects the textile from all other residues flexible magnets in particular can pose a problem they have an iron component and can scuff and scar textiles so this is a mount that we would never use for a prolonged period of time let's say over a year and also it's not something that one would use in an enclosed case so this particular textile is a sash not a not a skirt and the fringe posed a problem in terms of how to display it the what one solution would have been to hang it vertically so the fringe just would hang down and gravity would be a friend in this case due to the imagery and also to see more of the textile the curator and designer really wanted to show it horizontally and to do that I encase the fringe and the sheer polyester staple text there are stitches holding the stable text together not going through the textile itself that can be taken off once the exhibition is over the fringe is fully supported and it will be able to hang and hopefully defy gravity and not flop you you