Julia Nagle: How is science improving art conservation techniques?

Hi Julia, thanks for talking to me today. Before we start, just to avoid any confusion, could you please explain the difference between a conservator and a restorer? 

A conservator is just a bit more of a modern term, but we also say restorer as well because people often don’t know what you mean. So, it’s just a more modern term because what we’re trying to do is really preserve things and sort of protect them as opposed to actually take them back in time to some previous state, so we sort of acknowledge the fact that ageing happens for example, by calling ourselves conservators a bit more than restorers.  

How quickly is conservation developing and have there been any scientific or technological breakthroughs in the last few years, few decades, that have been real game changers for the industry? 

Technical art history is a discipline that has grown over the last 20 years, 30 years possibly and we’ve got all sorts of methods of analysing paint films without destroying the painting itself and imaging and things like using X-rays, all sorts of different technologies to understand what’s actually in a painting in the first place. And also to see when we’ve cleaned a surface, for example, you can look at it with a scanning electron microscope and you can see on a massively enlarged image, quite what you’ve actually done to the surface of the painting that might not be visible to the naked eye. So, you can really fine-tune your own techniques to ensure that what you’ve done hasn’t sort of leached a paint film or scratched it microscopically or anything like that. So, I think, possibly, for me anyway, I would say, the kind of analysis and the imaging and the understanding of what you’re actually doing on a much finer level than what the eye can just see is just huge. I mean there have been really important breakthroughs on how to clean acrylic paints because they’re fairly new, they’ve really been in use since about the 1950s and they do respond very differently to water compared to oil paints, for example. So, there’s been a huge amount of research there. A lot of it was EU-funded so I don’t know how that will carry on now, but there’ve been some interesting breakthroughs in nanotechnology and introducing gels for using water in a safe way, not as a liquid, but you can take dirt off of very complex surfaces using gels rather than using liquid water, so yeah, just even sort of technologies on how to safely use water and how to adjust, very finely tune the PH of water so that you can safely clean a film that you might not be able to clean otherwise and so really sort of fine adjustments with our own materials. 

Do you have a preference regarding a particular period or movement when it comes to conservation?  

I really loved working with older paintings, I really, really enjoyed my time doing that. I did it for about 10 years so it’s not that I dislike it, but it’s just fascinating working with modern artists and contemporary artists, and I think as a female, there are fantastic older ladies working… it’s a much less sort of a sexist world I think nowadays, and you know there are many, many more artists from different backgrounds and a lot, lot more women artists now who are recognised and that’s been fantastic working with them. I find a lot of the older women really, really inspiring. So, we’ve worked with Faith Ringgold at the Serpentine and Caroline Kunsman we worked with recently, and I think it’s really interesting the messages that people have got. I mean they are, the art there is, it's expressing our modern culture and expressing kind of issues of the day, and so as I really enjoy that side of it as well and understanding what messages people are trying to put forward and helping them to do that where we can. Also, there’s a lot of research that has to go into understanding what the artist’s intention was. Which is all really interesting and fun to do but it’s also great when you can just ask the artist and they’re there as well. I think it’s a really nice collaboration and I think one thing that I found which I think would surprise quite a lot of people is how much contemporary artists are really interested in their materials and interested in their techniques. And I really want to support artists, that’s what we are trying to do. We’re trying to get the art out there, trying to support artists and having their work exhibited in the way they want it to be seen and there are some really important messages to be understood from it.

You mentioned to me before we started speaking, Julia, that you once worked on a painting that had been vandalised by someone’s lover in a jealous fit of rage, like a very intense lovers’ tiff I think. Can you just explain a bit more about that story? 

A lovers’ tiff..... the person took bathroom paint, red bathroom paint and painted in big letters, big angry letters all over a painting, so that took a huge amount of time to remove the paint from the original painting but we did manage to do that. But yes, when someone’s angry as well they really press the paint in. So, we ended up using a porcupine spine to pick out tiny bits of paint from bubbles in the paint film where it kind of got pressed into these little crevasses in the paint film so we used a porcupine spine under the microscope to pick out all these little spots of paint to clean it. 

Do you have a favourite painting that you’ve ever restored or conserved and if so, why, why is it that painting? 

It’s very hard to say because you because it’s very hard to have a favourite and to pick out a favourite. It’s a great privilege to be able to touch what we can’t afford and to spend that one-on-one time, intimate time with great artists. So, you know, sitting in front of a Picasso, I had to clean off fly spots, fly faeces basically for a whole day but you’re sitting with a wonderful painting and so it’s always a privilege to work with wonderful art, and to have that one-on-one relationship, even if it’s for a temporary period.