AIC's 52nd Annual Meeting

Often in a professional conservation setting we are open about discussing the things we can or can’t do but are less forthcoming about the grey areas—the shoulds, the ifs, the maybes, the things we intuit about an object that are based in experience but are hard to explain or quantify. What is it that pushes us over the edge to take on a risky treatment that is outside of our normal comfort zone? Or a treatment that another conservator has perhaps stepped back from due to the degree of difficulty? Is it hubris or is it something that the object is telling us that lets us know in our gut that we can make a positive change—that we can make an inaccessible object accessible if we are willing to establish and hold the line on a degree of acceptable loss? In treating the 18th century register for the Independent Circular Congregational Church, the senior book and paper conservators took on the daunting task of addressing 250+ leaves that had gone through a previous WPA-era conservation treatment and a partial attempted treatment from 2009. The deterioration of the paper and iron gall ink, crumbling silk linings, and a failed binding had rendered the object completely unusable. However, as it was the record of one of the oldest continuously worshipping congregations in the South and a National Historic Landmark, the information contained within was of great importance to the state historical society and they wanted it to be able to be read beyond the first few pages.

It was obvious on examination that this piece would stretch the limits of what we normally consider to be an acceptable level of loss, and also, possibly, the skills of the individuals who undertook the treatment. The senior conservators worked to create a flexible treatment plan to stabilize the leaves that addressed the previous treatments and allowed the conservators to support each other both technically and emotionally to avoid project burnout. Dividing the work, creating check points, and working with the imaging department to create a high-resolution digital record prior to starting work were all key in ensuring that the object was treated in a manner that limited the loss of media, paper and information. While these are all things that we do instinctively once we get to a certain point in our careers, this project threw these techniques into sharp relief, forcing a reassessment of treatment biases, technical skills, and of the purpose and limits of conservation treatment at this moment in history.