Ann French, Collections Care Manager and Conservator (Textiles), sits with Ruby now as a part of her interview series, Inside the Gallery, which uncovers the amazing work that happens at the Whitworth and the fantastic individuals who make it. This week we discuss the art of conservation, the ethics of archaeology and why you shouldn’t touch artwork (no matter how much you want to!).

Ruby: Hello Ann.

Ann: Hi!

R: So, everyone at the Whitworth knows what you do, you’re a very integral part of what we do, but for those who don’t know, how would you describe your role at the Whitworth?

A: Well, I have two roles actually, to make life complicated for me and for the Whitworth. I joined the Whitworth as its Textile Conservator, I was their first ever full-time Textile Conservator, as it had only been a part-time role before that. But, when I joined, which will be twenty-two years ago this coming September, it was seen as an opportunity to make more of the textiles collection. So, my primary interest still remains the textile collection. And then because it’s a small team and teams need co-ordinating, I have the title of Collections Care Manager and that is to co-ordinate a team which comprises two other conservators and three technicians, and we do a combination of things, but it is basically collections care. The Whitworth has 60,000 odd objects and we want to display them and to access them safely so that they’re not damaged and so that the objects are still here as best we can manage in a hundred to two hundred years’ time.

R: So, how did you get into this?

A: Luck and coincidence. All conservators are rooted in a skill set and I’ve always loved sewing – I used to make all my own clothes and that kind of thing, and my parents were archaeologists. So, conservation was an integral part of my childhood because archaeological conservators were always employed on excavations, so I knew that it existed as a profession and as a training. And then one day it clicked in my head that there must be a form of conservation of textiles and, because I was lucky, my parents could ask around their friends and colleagues, and yes there was indeed conservation of textiles. And I volunteered, which is the way everyone usually gets going in museums and art galleries, for a whole summer, five days a week, at the Textile Conservation Centre which was then at Hampton Court Palace. They were very generous to me, and they gave me a taste of everything they did. And I thought ‘this is what I want to do’ and then I looked at how to train at the Textiles Conservations Centre and even back then it cost a fortune, so I parked the idea for about a year. Then my mother happened to be reading the Guardian, and there was an advert for apprenticeships in conservation at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and I applied and got the one for textiles.

R: So, with your parents being archaeologists, from an early age, you’re surrounded by the conservation of these incredibly old objects.

A: I was also surrounded by people talking about the material past. My sister and I couldn’t help that, because we would be sitting at one end of the dining table and people would be talking about it. And I think that it showed me that the material objects from the past can tell all sorts of stories and that they are worth preserving. And creating the circumstances in which to preserve things as best you can is really worth investing in. But also, where I think my parents did influence my attitude towards conservation is that they didn’t think that the objects were sacred and shouldn’t be handled. They must remain relevant – you can’t just box something away forever and pretend that it’s going to be fine. Actually, the art and challenge of conservation is to marry preservation with use now, so you enable another activity or display or a loan to happen, but at the same time a conservator will choose their methods to preserve it while allowing that activity to happen.

R: So, you were saying that you were interested in textiles when you were younger, was there anyone in your life that influenced that?

A: Oh, my grandmother. As with many textile conservators of my generation, at least if you probe, you will find that most of us were taught to sew by our grandmothers. And my grandmother gave me the ability to sew.

R: So, you worked at the V&A, how long were you there for?

A: It was a four-year apprenticeship, and then I got my first full-time job at the Burrell Collection, part of Glasgow Museums, and then I moved to an organisation called the Area Museum Council for the South West, from which I was made redundant when the conservation services were closed down, and then I went to work for the National Trust before coming to the Whitworth. I already knew the Whitworth well because we lived in Manchester in the 1970’s and so I have been visiting the Whitworth since then. I knew the textile collection and I knew it was very special, so I was very happy to apply for the job when it was advertised.

R: So, you work a lot with volunteers – has that been nice considering your start in conservation?

A: Yes, absolutely it is a bit of give-back because that’s how most start. In a way I disapprove of it because it’s unpaid labour, but at the same time it does help people clarify that it is really what they want to do. And if I hadn’t spent a summer at the Textile Conservation Centre, I wouldn’t have been able to make up my mind that it was what I wanted to do. And I have had volunteers who were interested in doing textile conservation but when they found out through experience what it was, said ‘this is not what I want to do’.

R: Yeah, it does give that flexibility and that freedom to kind of, if you’re a volunteer, just to go ‘actually, this isn’t for me’.

A: Yeah, it’s a great way of learning that this is not what you want to do. And because it’s such an expensive training, so if it’s not right for you that’s an expensive mistake.

R: Oh, absolutely.

A: And I think there is another role for volunteers, where we’ve had volunteers who have retired, and they just want to do something really different. And the sad fact is that without our committed volunteers we would not manage to improve the storage of the collections in the way we do. There’s a great blog post, which has been written about the difference they make. It’s been a great project and without volunteers it would never have happened.

R: What I find quite interesting is that with most of the people I’ve interviewed, they haven’t come from an artistic or museological background and I think you’re almost the exception to the rule in a way. So, with that background do you feel that those formative experiences of being around that dinner table talking about the material past still influences your work or do you feel like it was more of a jump-off point?

A: I think it gave me several things, and it may be some of the things that irritate my colleagues as well! It’s about always questioning something; you know my parents would never let anything lie, you had to get to the bottom of ‘it’. And that was very much the dinner table conversation that I was party to as a child, there was a lot of questioning, a lot of problem solving. They were all academics having serious academic conversations, and I listened to that. I think this certainly helped me when I was a conservation apprentice, because I wasn’t afraid to ask questions and I wasn’t afraid of academics. When I trained at the V&A, you were just thrown in at the deep end and the then head of textile conservation was quite a character, which she had needed to be as one of the almost-founders of the textile conservation profession. Her approach to conservation was that it was always a problem to be solved. How would you tackle hanging a six metre by four metre textile or how would you squeeze a storage system into an inadequate space? That was always the approach I was taught, and I’m very grateful for that.

R: I know that you have worked with outsider groups, such as the We Are 11 exhibition with Stanley Grove Primary Academy.

A: Yes! Oh, they were fantastic.

R: So, how do you find it working with people who don’t have that experience? Is it important to you?

A: I think it’s absolutely essential. What I loved about working with the kids from Stanley Grove was that they had the courage and the initiative to just ask off-the-wall questions and you need that. And they got conservation so quickly, they got what we were preoccupied about. Also, what I loved about it was they could see how it transferred to their home environment and the stuff that was meaningful to them at home, and that thing of if you care about something, there are ways to do it. I think all of us should be challenged like that because otherwise you just slip into a groove and you have to be jolted out of the groove.

R: Yes, absolutely! Jonathan Jones, from the Guardian, once described the Whitworth as being one of the most democratic art galleries in the UK because of that access to the collection. So, with external collections coming into the building, what’s the process?

A: Works come to us packed, we unpack them, we condition report them and we put them on display. But there is a long period of negotiation before the work even arrives about how it should be displayed, what it is, what it measures and all that. We will have that conversation with the lending institution or individual and then when the object arrives, we facilitate it. My role is that I do something called condition reporting, which all conservators do endlessly and relentlessly. You examine the work, and if it’s a Whitworth work going to somewhere else, Dan, Sarah or I will write a condition report and we take loads of photographs, and that package goes off with the work to wherever is borrowing it.

For example, we have had a loan request from a national institution for one of our textiles. I examine its condition and see if it can travel and be displayed elsewhere. We analyse the information sent us regarding display environments, and between the organisations we work out how to prepare it for display & travel. Part of this is to write a condition report. They look at our textiles and see what I’ve written and annotate it and when the textiles come back, I check what I’ve written to make sure that no damage has occurred during the process of lending it. So, for something that’s coming in that does not belong to the Whitworth, the system is reversed.

R: I see. So, we were talking about material culture which is very indicative of the history and the cultures that surround that object. With textiles, often there is a practical use of that textile in the original context, what do you think about exhibiting those kinds of works? Is that different than exhibiting a textile work that has been made for the purpose of being exhibited?

A: It is absolutely different, and I think that it’s one of the great challenges of working with textiles is that they have traditionally been made to be used. They were not made to be a work of art to be put on a wall. Now they might be, but historically they haven’t been. And what I would say is that attitudes to this have changed a great deal because we now want to probe the context of the preservation [of the textile piece] before we make any decisions, so if it is excavated material, for example, why has it been preserved? What conditions has it been preserved in? Because actually it is the context that it’s been found in that actually tells the story.

Textiles aren’t neutral objects, you can’t divorce them from their context, most obviously with excavated material and in places of worship. Every single culture probably involves textiles in a form of worship, in which case that textile should probably stay there. The challenge now in conservation is enabling that context to be preserved, and in many ways the context is more important because a textile can become almost irrelevant if removed from that place of use.

R: Well, that’s the issue, isn’t it? Because there is often very little documentation of the original context that an object has been removed from.

A: When I started as a conservator, people were really preoccupied with turning an 18th century dress, which had been much altered, back into how it would have been in the 18^th century. I conserved an alter frontal by turning it back into the cope it was. I wouldn’t do this now because looking at the history of the object since that moment is just as important. Dresses from the 18^th century were often worn as fancy dress or converted into 19^th century dresses – that’s their history. The fact that the altar frontal I worked on was a cope originally, well, why did I feel, 25 years ago, that it needed to go back into a cope? But that was very much the attitude of the time – it’s changed completely now, especially with developments in digital photography.

R: Is there anything that cannot be conserved and how is the conservation decision made?

A: I think what many people do not realise is that conservation is actually a decision. Someone at some point has decided to keep something. This means there is something of ‘value’ that is deemed worth preserving, which then raises the questions of who has assigned ‘value’ and why. Over the mists of time – this reasoning can be either lost or become irrelevant or become relevant again. All museum/art gallery collections reflect changing value systems – there are many textiles in the Whitworth that have never been displayed. Another challenge of course, is that some things are made in such a way that you cannot conserve them – the materials cannot be put back together, they degrade or the method of making collapses. Think of the plastic bag you find in pieces at the back of a drawer. It cannot be put back together and in the case of a plastic bag – unlikely to have enough value. But what if it did have ascribed value? For all conservators – that is where the challenge lies and is becoming more and more complex with 20^th century materials and contemporary art.

And I think this aspect of decision-making for, and sometimes by, conservators is what has been ignored historically and by art historians and curators, unless they are in the know and there have been ones in the know, is they do not realise how the act of conservation has participated in the object’s history, because you can transform it.

R: Absolutely.

A: There is a spectacular example which I use because it’s a really good visual example, it’s the Sutton Hoo Helmet, which if you look at photographs of it over time, you will see the various interpretations that have happened thanks to the various conservation treatments And conservators can have that power and so conservation has to be a dialogue, you can’t do it on your own. And the really critical thing about conservation is the debate you have over what the object is, what are you preserving, why are you preserving it, what damage are you prepared to live with? Because putting it on display will damage a work, and you don’t really have much choice about that, but what we do is to try to limit that damage. These are debates to be had; there are no simple answers, so you just have to be really clear about your decision making and that’s what conservators are now trained to do. Not only are we taught how to do the repair work, but it’s also about the process of decision making to get to the end result.

R: So, you were talking about how exhibiting a work, within itself, can damage it.

A: Yes, especially at the Whitworth because 99% of our collection is made of organic material, which will start to deteriorate in light especially, so putting a piece of paper or a textile on display, inevitably, is going to cause a slow chemical reaction, it’s happening, we can’t stop it, but we can slow it down.

R: So, this damage by light is why the light levels in the Whitworth are lower and why daylight is not used?

A: Absolutely. The trouble with daylight – especially here in Manchester, is how erratic it is. So we use artificial lighting set to the highest levels that the average adult can see at, which protects the textiles and works on paper from fading and being chemically damaged. It’s like staying out of the sun on holiday. We also try not to have the same works on display all the time. You will notice that every gallery changes every year. We call this rotation and it’s an act of preservation, while also providing our visitors with a variety of things to see.

R: Do some artists come in and have very specific care plan for their works?

A: No, most don’t but many are interested if you’re given a chance to talk with them. Most of them are, quite rightly, far more preoccupied with and interested in the making of their work. But I would say, as a conservator, that most don’t think through what happens after the work is made. They don’t think about storage, they don’t think about display, they don’t necessarily think that the public might handle something. I sometimes hope that the artist is aware that what their request will do to their work of art, because obviously we respect how the artist wants to display their work but, sometimes, I don’t think they’ve thought it through.

R: That’s fair.

A: It’s great when they do think it through and I’ve worked a lot with Alice Kettle, for example, and we’ve now got a relationship whereby if she wants to ask something about conservation, she will just email me and there are a couple of other textile artists who also do that and I will say no don’t use that, or try that, or yes do this. I hope my advice is not to interfere with their artistic process, but they’re just getting a bit of extra information which will enable their work to be better looked after.

R: Well, I don’t want to keep you that much longer, but is there anything else you would like to talk about?

A: I think I’d just like to add that there is not a single exhibition that my team have not been involved with in the gallery. We put up and take down every single exhibition – every single work on the walls will have been through the hands of the CCAT team, and yet unless you know about it, it’s like the works have magically floated onto the wall. But they don’t. It’s quite a unique role to have as a team.

R: It’s almost like you’re Santa.

A: Yeah, we are, he appears doesn’t he – he appears overnight and [laughs].

R: I didn’t think I’d be comparing you to Santa [laughs] but there we go.

A: Yeah, but it does kind of appear overnight and it is a sort of unseen element, you know that age old metaphor of the duck with its feet paddling away under the surface and people don’t see that. And yet when they do see that I like to think that they’re quite interested by it.

R: Well, thank you very much.

A: Not at all!