The material collection
The Material Collection research brings to the museum conservation departments a consortium covering technical and material problems together with aspects of collection care and management research across the Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow.
The consortium has expertise and technical resources across material science, new materials, scientific imaging, fibre analysis, aging and fading, the ethics and practices of conservation, and international networks promoting conservation and collection care and management.
These will be used to augment existing museum conservation activity with specific research within the areas of Fine Art and Textile Conservation and Technical Art History. In addition, wherever appropriate, researchers will seek to build on Glasgow University’s existing database of artists’ interviews with a strong focus on material choices and significance of methods.
Material Collections research has two aspects. The first is concerned with the study of technical and material issues while the second is concerned with the collection care and management.
Technical and material studies
The ARTIST ROOMS collection includes extraordinary bodies of work by single artists, offering a unique opportunity to carry out in-depth studies of a particular artist’s materials and techniques regarding intention and meaning, alongside an interdisciplinary exploration of their specific vulnerabilities and conservation challenges.
Our research will examine problems around the fading of printing materials and the study of changes in the chemical, physical and mechanical properties of fibres which form the support structure of many of these works.
Other projects will focus on the impact new materials and processing technology has on current artists and on the longevity and material stability of new mixed media and unusual material combinations in the ARTIST ROOMS collection.
Responding to the representation of conceptual works within the collection, we shall explore the precise material choices such artists have made, and how bound they have been to ideological suspicions of materialism, particularly in the context of their dissemination through display and touring, and individual and institutional collection.
This will include and investigation regarding the attention paid to specific material choices and their practical and symbolic power used, paradoxically, in relationship to such ‘immaterial’ work.