The Textile Specialty Group audience got a real treat with Dana Goodin\u2019s talk on using agarose gels on tapestries.\u00a0 Dana, who works at the Textile Conservation Laboratory at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in NYC, used agarose gel on two tapestries in two different ways.<\/p>\n
The first was a Baumgarten tapestry dating to the 1910s.\u00a0 It, and many others, were discovered on the walls of a townhouse on the Upper West Side of Manhattan after a developer purchased the property.\u00a0 In previous years, the room the tapestries were in had been rented out as a studio apartment.\u00a0 (As an NYC resident myself, you can only imagine the envy this inspired in me!)\u00a0 The tapestries were attached to the wall around the perimeter with nails.\u00a0 Stains from leeching plaster were prevalent and the lining had fallen down behind one tapestry, resulting in ballooning and a large slit at the bottom.\u00a0 A square had even been cut out of a tapestry to access a utility box!\u00a0 The tapestries were de-installed in 2013 and brought to the Lab, where there were laid flat in a humidity tent.\u00a0 The humidity was maintained between 52% – 58% for many months. \u00a0This was not enough, however, to restore flexibility to the desiccated silk elements of the tapestry. \u00a0Since the silk in the tapestry was in such poor shape, it was feared it would disintegrate during wet cleaning.\u00a0 It was therefore decided to clean, and of course humidify, the tapestries through agarose gel.\u00a0 Dana told us that the Textile Conservation Lab would usually use a 1% density gel if the material were smooth and could later be rinsed under suction.\u00a0 Because this was not an option with the silk, it was decided to also rinse the cleaned tapestry with agarose gel and deionized water.\u00a0 For cleaning, 3.4% density gel, \u00bc\u201d in thickness, was cast with Orvus.\u00a0 The Orvus solution was 5ml to 300ml water. \u00a0The entire Baumgarten tapestry was cleaned with gel, although the wool elements received thicker gels and were rinsed under suction, rather than with gel.\u00a0 The treatment was a great success: the appearance was incredibly improved and the tapestry regained enough moisture that it could afterwards be rolled without worry.<\/p>\n
Clearly, this treatment required a lot of agarose gel, the cost of which escalated quickly.\u00a0 Not to mention the time spent casting it.\u00a0 Therefore, Dana and the other conservators at the Lab tried out reusing the gels.\u00a0 Tests were performed on white China silk and it was found that after three rinses\/soaks of the gels in Orvus, no soiling was redeposited on the test silk.\u00a0 This was a great find, although it was concurrently found that the gels could only be reused three times before disintegrating.<\/p>\n
The second tapestry Dana spoke about was an Agam tapestry from the 1970s.\u00a0 It was made from white wool yarn and a variety of wool\/synthetic colored yarns.\u00a0 It suffered from hard glue residue on the top and bottom 2\u201d of the tapestry, which previously attached a lining.\u00a0 Complications arose from the fact that the red and black yarns bled.\u00a0 The face of the tapestry was cleaned via dry surface sponging, but obviously that did nothing to address the glue, which was so hard it couldn\u2019t be sewn through.\u00a0 Tests showed that amyl acetate removed most of the glue.\u00a0 Application methods tested were with blotters, cotton linters, and agarose gel.\u00a0 The agarose gel proved the most effective.\u00a0 Gauze was placed below the tapestry, then the gel was draped over the glue, before being weighted.\u00a0 Although effective, this proved very time consuming.\u00a0 To speed things up, Dana and the other conservators decided to apply the amyl acetate directly to the glue and then drape the gel over these sections with weights on top.\u00a0 2% gel was used for this, and left on for one hour.\u00a0 This process was repeated until as much glue was removed as possible.\u00a0 The treated areas were rinsed with deionized water, and the tapestry received a new lining and a Velcro hanging mechanism.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t think I\u2019m overstating things by saying these were two awesome treatments.\u00a0 Thanks for sharing them with us, Dana!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Textile Specialty Group audience got a real treat with Dana Goodin\u2019s talk on using agarose gels on tapestries.\u00a0 Dana, who works at the Textile Conservation Laboratory at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in NYC, used agarose gel on two tapestries in two different ways. The first was a Baumgarten tapestry dating to … Continue reading “45th Annual Meeting \u2013 Textile Session, June 1, \u201cAgarose, Two Ways: Successes and Challenges in Large Scale Gel Application\u201d by Dana Goodin”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":207,"featured_media":16731,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,16,17],"tags":[79,1003],"class_list":["post-17025","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-annual-meeting","category-specialty-sessions","category-textiles","tag-aics-45th-annual-meeting","tag-textile-specialty-group"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/resources.culturalheritage.org\/conservators-converse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17025","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/resources.culturalheritage.org\/conservators-converse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/resources.culturalheritage.org\/conservators-converse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/resources.culturalheritage.org\/conservators-converse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/207"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/resources.culturalheritage.org\/conservators-converse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17025"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/resources.culturalheritage.org\/conservators-converse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17025\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/resources.culturalheritage.org\/conservators-converse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/resources.culturalheritage.org\/conservators-converse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/resources.culturalheritage.org\/conservators-converse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}