Collectors’ habits bad for conservators

Press, 2 February 1982, Page 6

Collectors’ habits bad for conservators

An astonishing number of New Zealanders have a bad habit which makes life tough for art conservators: they glue prints and drawings flat on to cardboard, which is not good for the health of a work of art.

Future conservators at the new Robert McDougall Art Gallery conservation laboratory, opened yesterday, will probably worry less about the effects of" climate and other art storage conditions and more about repairing the follies of New Zealand art collectors.

These are a couple of observations from Ms Mary Wood-Lee, a senior paper conservator at the Pacific Region Conservation Centre at Bishop Museum in Honolulu, who has been on loan to the gallery since June to help set up the laboratory and storage system. The $25,000 laboratory, which was dug out under the

gallery itself, will be a national centre for conservation of works of art on paper.

“It is rather sad opening a laboratory you have worked on and know that you won’t be working in it,” she said. “The McDougall laboratory is very much part of a plan for national conservation of art works.” Ms Wood-Lee said that after coming from the sharp cuts made by President Reagan in America it was very exciting to find the New Zealand Government supporting such conservation work.

“I hope that next time I come back to New Zealand I will find a laboratory staff of four and a laboratory overflowing with work,” she said. Before returning to Honolulu, one of Ms Wood-lee’s last consultative duties will be to help appoint the laboratory’s first senior conservator, who will probably

have to be recruited overseas. The new conservator will be helped by Ms Lesley Cobb, who has been at the laboratory since she graduated in November from a conservators’ course run at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery. Ms Cobb will spend a year at the McDougall laboratory as an intern with the choice of staying on or going overseas for more experience after that. The laboratory has already done conservation work, mainly on works on paper from the gallery, but also on works from other galleries and a few private collectors. Amateur collectors contemplating the sticking of a print or drawing on to board are requested to reflect on the fact that this is not only ruinous to the work but' can be removed only flake by flake, hour by hour, with a scalpel.