I saw these other areas that looked like a lot of different metals. A lot of the gold had the corrosion of the steel that had grown over it so it was difficult to see what was there. It was dark gray. You couldn't see the gold. The cleaning revealed that whole area. It didn't look as ornate as it does now, because so much of it was tarnished and corroded. For this one, it's been really effective to use the abrasiveness of the cotton, and that with the ethanol has been removing the corrosion. It's like tarnish on silver.
A piece like this, a lot of it involves basic cleaning, as opposed to restoration?
In this piece, in particular, yes. It can really range depending what you're working on, on your ultimate goal. Sometimes it's cleaning, sometimes it's restoration, sometimes it's just making sure that you're preserving it. So these pieces are going through some conservation to make sure they're presentable and that they're OK to be displayed.
Your standard for OK might be different from someone else's.
It depends on the object. If you're looking at metal, you want to make sure that something is not corroding in a way that's dangerous, you know, that it's stable, that it's not going to continue to deteriorate.
If you were working on something and a piece of it was missing, you would have a choice to replace the piece or leave it as it is. What would usually dictate that choice?
It's a decision I don't make on my own. I would talk to the curator about it and we would decide if it's necessary. Sometimes, it's distracting if something's missing - you don't really see the rest of the object. If something large is gone, your eye goes straight to it. So sometimes you'll do an aesthetic restoration to help people see what's really there. If it's something that's purely decorative, you might go all the way and make it blend in. If it's archaeological, because it's used for research as well, you might not go that far. It might just be a partial restoration that you can see to help complete what was there.
Generally, if a work of art is on display, and has been restored or a piece has been replaced, would it say that on the label?
Usually not, but it's done in such a way that someone will be able to tell. We're not trying to fake anyone later on about what we have. There are techniques that conservators could use to figure out what's there. And everything that we do is heavily documented, from photos to written reports. We want it to be very obvious that it's there. And one of the other main things is that whatever we do needs to be reversible and needs to be done with materials that don't age or deteriorate, something that's stable over time.
