Emerging Grant Report 2024
Read on below Alison Moule’s internship experience supported by CAPC’s Emerging Conservator Grant.
(Read more about CAPC’s Emerging Conservator Grant here. The next application deadline for the grant is March 1st, 2025.)
With financial support from the CAPC Emerging Conservator Grant, I completed an internship at Art Conservation de Rigueur (ACdR) Conservation in San Francisco, California from May to September, 2024. This internship was an excellent opportunity to work on a great variety of conservation projects at a private conservation company.
I am an emerging textile conservator and have found it very difficult to find internships focused on textile conservation in Canada. At ACdR, I assisted with treatments of textile objects including quilts and tapestries. Alongside other interns and project managers, I worked on a large-scale anoxia and re-housing project of around 3000 African-American quilts from the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). This project involved preparing quilts to go in anoxia chamber, creating the anoxia chamber, and re-folding the quilts after the treatment for storage in archival boxes. I assisted preparators with creating the anoxia chambers using Marvelseal and heat clamps.
I practiced tapestry-repair and lining techniques on three Flemish Tapestries, sometimes leading pre-program interns in activities they were less familiar with. The process involved mapping out the tapestry on paper, and photographing quadrants of the large tapestries before and after treatment. Repairs were done in areas where silk weft threads were damaged and wool warp threads were exposed. Warp threads were secured to a backing fabric with colour-matched polyester threads, and a backing was created to relieve hanging stress. The backing was stitched to the tapestry with stitches that were not visible on the front.
I also was able to work with objects outside of my area of specialization. I conducted tape-removal and leather-conditioning treatments on leather-bound books. I worked with an intern focused on paper conservation to complete a lining and tear-repair treatment of a piece of early-20th century sheet music. I worked on-site at a historic restaurant in San Francisco’s Chinatown to clean glass and metal chandeliers. I began a treatment involving cleaning and in-filling of three early-19th century wax portrait miniatures mounted on glass. It was valuable experience to work with a variety of types of objects, and with interns and staff who had different educational backgrounds and specializations. ACdR invites both pre-program and post-graduate interns from around the world. One of the special parts of the internship was working with interns from as far as Hong Kong, Spain, and France, as well as from different parts of the United States.The San Francisco Bay Area was a beautiful venue for an internship, and I was able to visit a number of museums in the area. While ACdR was closed for summer holidays in June, I volunteered at Lacis Museum of Lace and Textiles in Berkeley, assisting with mounting pieces of lace from the collection for an exhibit of Armenian needle lace. This internship supported by the CAPC Emerging Conservator Grant was an overall rewarding experience, and provided me with a variety of skills that will surely be of value as I move further into my conservation career.
Alison Moule