Our next objects major is Olav Jerod. Olaf graduated from Lawrence University in 2014 with a BA in History and Studio Art, followed by a semester at the Longa Experimental Art School in eastern Iceland. Like L, Olav is also a talented artist with an impressive portfolio featuring primarily wooden sculptures. Including one Viking inspired piece commissioned by his university that is showcased prominently on campus. After obtaining his degree, Olav worked as a studio assistant to sculptor Rob Nielsen, where he became interested in learning more about how objects become transformed in his words, both deliberately and spontaneously, thereby holding countless stories within them by way of internships at the Yale University Art Gallery. Olo then found his way to Woodpeck, where he chose to study objects. Conservation with a minor concentration in wooden objects, that was supervised by Kathy Gillis. Olo's graduate career has beautifully melded his artists background with the more general specialty of objects conservation. His first summer internship saw him return to Iceland to the town of Satisfied, where he helped staff at the Technical Museum recover from a series of devastating landslides that had occurred there the December prior his second year back at Winter tour. Some highlights included the treatment of an 18th century wooden coffin, humidification, flattening, and lost compensation of the horn and ivory veneer on a visa platinum back yam and game board. It only took me two years to get that pronunciation down and the three D scanning and digital restoration of the 58 fragments of a monumental zinc sculpture once displayed on the side of a brewery in Wilmington. It's really cool project. After his second summer internship at the Midwest Art Conservation Center in Minneapolis, a regional center where he worked with Mike and Emery and Courtney Murray. Olav moved to New York to complete his third year internship in the Objects Lab at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At the met, Olaf returned to his roots, this is a pun where he worked with furniture conservator Daniel Hausdorff and painted and gilded surfaces. Conservator Pascal Patrice to care for wooden objects that had become transformed in a variety of ways, be it purposefully through many rounds of painting campaigns over the life of one carousel horse, or by natural exposure to wind, rain, and later museum pests. Over the life of a guardian Buddhist deity statue, Olav joined the histories of these objects and I would say became transformed himself in the process. Above everything, Olav is a kind and thoughtful being who considers deeply, thinks creatively, and can find poetic beauty in most things. He's also extremely witty and funny and has brought this easy spirit to his work at the met. Those around him must see it too, because they have asked him to stay on for another year, at least helping with a massive renovation project of the entire modern and contemporary wing of the museum. Let us now welcome Olaf to the podium. Thank you, Lauren, for that incredibly kind introduction. I could use up all of my allotted time, expressing how grateful I am for my experiences in this program, but because time is short, instead of trying to cover everything I did this year at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I'm going to speak in detail about just a few projects. And I'll do this by telling the stories of three landscapes. The first is a rough and craggy terrain riddled with tunnels. The second is a record of geologic processes alternating events of deposition and erosion. The last is a field completely paved over like a supermarket parking lot. I worked on this project that I'll talk about first under the supervision of conservator Daniel Hausdorff. This sculpture from the late tenth to early 11th century depicts the Buddhist deity Batu Bishan 101 of four divine guardian kings, who were each a protector of the cardinal directions. Apart from the arms, the sculpture was carved from a single solid piece of Lcov wood, a dense and ring porous hardwood. Traces of matt polychrome in white, black, red, brown, and light blue cover the sculpture. And there are remnants of gilding in the Bishop Monton Crown Basu Bisha. Monton was typically depicted dressed in the armor of a military general, holding in his left hand a stupa, and in his right a weapon, often a short baton, Guardian King's sculptures were commonly positioned at the entrances of cities in the belief that they had the power to repel invaders. This sculpture came from the Riso Goku Kuji temple in what is now the city of Hashimoto in Waka, Jama prefecture in Japan. The sculpture is missing its right hand and its current left arm is a replacement basu bisha. Manton is held aloft on the upturned hands of Ten, an Earth deity, who is flanked on either side by dwarf demons. And this configuration is typical with his depiction. Severe damage caused by tunneling insects compromise the sculpture's structural integrity, leaving it at risk of being physically damaged during installation, intentional handling, or unwanted visitor interaction. The sculpture has had a long history of shedding fragments when being moved. Insect damage is particularly severe in the sculpture's base and in what remains of the Bishop Mountain's proper right arm. Material lost from the edges of the base has decreased the area of the base's footprint. When standing upright, the sculpture has two positions it can tip into in both positions. When viewed from the side, it feels intuitively at risk of tipping backwards. Here's a typical example of the extent of insect damage. The holes are all approximately 1 mm in diameter. And in this photo, you can also see shreds of packing material that have been ensnared by the rough surface texture. In one of the holes in the sculpture's base, I found the exoskeleton of an insect that appears to be of a variety of furniture Beetle furniture. Beetles are native to Europe but have proliferated worldwide, meaning this information can't narrow down where and potentially when damage to the sculpture occurred. To better understand the chronology of changes that it's undergone, I assembled all of the publications I could find in which the sculpture is featured. Most notably, it was included in Japanese Art in the West, published in 1966 and then the following year in Japanese arts of the High in period. While the books were published in consecutive years, it's not exactly clear how much time elapsed between these two photos were taken. In addition, the lighting conditions of the photos are not identical. Still, these two images can be compared during the time of the two books publishings. The sculpture was in the possession of Howard C. Hollis, a monuments man stationed in Japan. After returning to the US in 1948, Hollis became a leading dealer specializing in Japanese art. The most obvious difference between the two photos is the removal of the modern, slightly undersized and awkward appearing right hand. But the fill material concealing the gap between the figure's left shoulder and its replacement arm was also cleared away, likely so that arm could be detached. Comparing the two photos more closely, it becomes evident that in the intervening time, the damage by insects worsened. This is clearest in the areas that I've highlighted. The progression of all the sculptor's insect damage is not documented in these two images, but it does show that much of the damage happened fairly recently. As part of my documentation of the sculpture, I also conducted comprehensive imaging. In I, R, a scene with five seed Buddhas is revealed on the figure's crown. The appearance of some pigments in false color images can be used to identify them across the figure. The red brown paint appears dark in the false color UVR images and yellow in the false color IRR images. These characteristics are diagnostic of red ochre. Here is the area around the figures right shoulder. In this region under UV light, a fibrous fill in the large crack in the figure's chest is emphasized based on the color of the fluorescence. An animal glue may have been used as a binder. While studying the sculpture surfaces, I found a small paper fragment at the top of the fibers fill right underneath the figure's chin. This fragment could become adhered while the pill was being applied and still wet. The fragment has a distinctive photo mechanical printing pattern. The rosette tessellation that makes up the printed image is characteristic of the offset lithography and electro photography printing processes. The use of both of these processes was widespread by 1960 and continues today. Also in this image, you can see a small amount of surviving pink paint. This was likely the flesh tone that covered the figure's face. Daniel, I also comprehensively x rayed the sculpture. This revealed a large insect tunnel, roughly 2 cm wide, traveling almost like a digestive tract the entire height of the figure, from an opening in the top of its crown to another in the back of its right leg. This tunnel may have contributed to the crack in the figure's chest that was subsequently filled with the fibrous material. The x rays also reveal that multiple joinery systems have been used to connect the figure's arms to its body. A deep square mortise is visible in the left shoulder. A hole of this shape is not present in the right. Instead there's a steel threaded rod. And below the rod, two round holes with conical ends, suggesting that they were bored with a twist drill bit. The multiple mounting systems in the right shoulder indicate the arm position may have been repeatedly modified over time. Synthesizing all of this information from examination. The sculptor's main issues to address through treatment were it's incredibly fragile surfaces and the instability caused by losses in its base. Choosing a consolidant to stabilize the surface is a consequential decision because it is, for all intents and purposes, irreversible. A lot of time was spent thinking about researching and discussing potential consolidatets, the leading contenders that I considered. But far B 98, 72 of course. Regal Rez 11 26, PlexuG 611, and Sturgeon Blue. To help narrow this selection, I found a piece of wormeaten Elm. A tree with similar features to Lcov proteins denature at 40 degrees Celsius and to make sure there were no living insects in the log, before bringing it into the Met, I baked it in my, or also Sara's oven until the internal temperature reached 140 degrees Fahrenheit. And then I left it in for 45 min for good measure. I then fed the log into samples and submerged them in consolidate solutions to gauge how deeply they penetrated, how much strength they imparted in the damaged wood, and how they changed the wood's appearance. While conducting these tests, I kept feeling a little bit uncomfortable with the prospect of infusing a 1,000 year old sculpture with plastic. The consolidates I tested imparted enough strength to secure the fragile surfaces, but none would be able to strengthen the porous wood enough to survive a catastrophic impact. After discussions with Daniel, we decided using Sturgeon glue was the most appropriate material for consolidation. Wood and protein glues are a pair of materials with a deep affinity for each other. In addition, protein glues in general had already been used on the sculpture, and my use of Sturgeon glue would not be crossing any new boundaries. Surgeon glue and water also allowed the use of a non polar solvent. Shell sold 38 to mask areas where consolidate was unwanted and could create stark tide lines. Here's an area before treatment, one of the knees of the left dwarf demon. The first step was to apply shell all D 38 around the area being consolidated. If the area was large, repeated applications of solvent was necessary to reform the boundary as it evaporated. The next step was to apply consolidate with a brush. The Sturgeon glue I used ranged in concentration 5-7% And I added a drop of ox to break the surface tension. Multiple applications of consolidate are sometimes necessary depending on the condition of the area being treated. And here is that area after the consolidate has dried and the shell all evaporated, I consolidated every area where the sculpture's original surface had been lost to insect damage, A process that took several weeks. Consolidation did slightly saturate the treated area. Here you can see the difference between treated and untreated regions. I was most worried about this effect on the faces of the dwarf demons, where treatment could end up emphasizing the losses by darkening them. To remedy this, I made a dust mixture primarily composed of cellulose powder with a little bit of fine sawdust and rotten stone mixed in. I applied the dust with a brush, lightening the darkened treated areas, and the dust can be removed easily with a puffer blower. The next phase of the project was to create a base to stabilize the sculpture while on display. Like I mentioned earlier, a good deal of material had been lost from the base due to insect activity surviving, but damaged areas were at risk of being crunched. If the heavy sculpture was ever tipped or rocked, a safe and effective base had to provide stable support of structurally strong areas while avoiding the most fragile areas. I also had to consider the aesthetic preferences of the curator and exhibition designer, who of course the base to be as small and inconspicuous as possible. To do this, I drafted the bases outline using clear acrylic sheets so I could still see the features of the sculptor's underside. The finished base would be made up of an epoxy interface cast to fit the contours of the sculptor's underside, then adhered to a stiff steel plate. My designs went through many iterations until finally arriving at this design for the bass outline. And I passed it over to the Mets machine shop so they could cut it out a four inch steel. Next, Daniel and I created the epoxy interface by making an impression of the underside of the sculpture. I considered multiple epoxies for this, eventually arriving at PC woody, which was soft enough for the sculpture to be pressed into, but viscous enough not to flow during the long curing time. I used a mylar sheet as a barrier layer between the epoxy and the sculpture that was thin enough to still allow morphological details to be captured, but thick enough that epoxy couldn't lock the sculpture into the interface by flowing into undercuts. At this stage, these are the two components. I carefully aligned them and joined them with a two party poxy and then filed the interface to the edges of the steel plate. Here's the result. To avoid seeing the base, its footprint was perfectly routed into the sculpture's pedestal by the Mets Woodshop. To the base, I added a layer of soft but thin ultra swede. The base fits exactly into its recess in the pedestal, making it very difficult to insert. Alps impossible to remove because there's nothing to grab onto To make insertion and removal easier, I drilled and tapped a hole into which a large bolt can be screwed and used as a temporary handle, and then of course, removed before the sculpture is installed. As a final layer to the stack, I added a sheet of mylar. Here's the sculpture on display. The curator decided not to exhibit it with its replacement left arm. The base that I made is almost completely invisible, but it is there though. Finally, here's one of the studying photographs that was taken by the Mets imaging department just before the show opened. The next project I'm going to share is one I worked on with Conservator Pascal Patrice. By the time I joined, she had already been at work on it for some time. This is a carousel horse in a military style from the golden age of carousels. The depicted saddle is a specific variety of saddle, one designed by Union Civil War General George Mcclellan. Carousel figures from the late 19th and early 20th centuries were finely carved and lavishly poly chrome as functional objects. These figures were frequently repainted as coatings were eroded or damaged. Today, many coats of discolored varnish have turned the whole horse in almost monochromatic olive color. The horse was made in the Philadelphia workshop of DC. Mueller and brother Daniel Mueller, the co founder and head carver, was considered a master carousel figure horse carver. His work was highly sought after and widely replicated by competitors. The horse is made from assembled parts and its body is assembled almost like a box, it's hollow. This photo gives you a sense of how popular carousels once were to attract customers. Your carousel had to have the most extravagant figures. And this was done by positioning those in full view in the outermost ring of figures on the carousel. Once on the carousel, as you got closer to the center, the figures became simpler and smaller. The Mets horse came from the outermost ring, meaning it's among the best of the best. The horse had originally been brought to Pascal for her to study what it might have looked like just after leaving Mueller's workshop. Across the horse, there are losses to the poly chrome, ranging in size from individual flakes of paint to large areas of abrasion, where carved features in the wood have been exposed and rounded. From repeated wear at the margins of these patches of bare wood, painted colors not visible on the surface can be seen in the paint stratigraphy with a naked eye. The curator believed the original factory paint still existed at the bottom of the layers. Supplementing the cross sections Pascal had already taken, We took dozens of new samples, bringing the number of sample sites to over 50, with many of the sites yielding multiple samples. Here's my own diagram to keep all the locations straight. And keep in mind that this is just one side of the horse I mounted and prepared the new samples. We examined and image them under the microscope, difficult to see in normal light. The number and thickness of varnish layers is striking in the UV micrographs. Each varnish layer is delineated by coating of dirt and grime. After looking at many cross sections, pattern started to emerge at the bottom of the paint. Stratigraphy is two priming layers, the first green and the second white. Here on top of these priming layers, the salmon colored layer represents an earlier color of the horse's body. The green and white priming layers are visible here here. This sample also includes wood from the carved horse itself. From this information, it would be tempting to assume the green and white priming layers are part of the horse's original paint scheme. But as we continue to take and look at samples, we started coming across layers underneath the green priming layer. These layers were fragmentary, only found in single samples. It was by pure chance. The samples we took included them at all. Here, underneath the green primer is a thin application of a metallic leaf. With this information, the green primer cannot be considered part of the original paint system. But it is part of the earliest existing painting campaign that, based on documentary evidence, could date to 1927. As a way to visually represent all the information we gathered, Pascal and I wanted to virtually restore the horse to its earliest extant paint scheme. To do this, we brought the horse to the Mets imaging department where it was three D scanned via photogrammetry and here is the resulting three D model. This scan also proved very useful, allowing us to take the horse with us wherever we went. On an ipad for our virtual restoration, I stripped the model of its photographic skin so we could start from scratch with applying the color to choose the paint colors for our model. We opened the cross sections in Photoshop and use the Eyedropper tool to extract color from the relevant layers. This sample is from the horse's harness strap. The colors were then applied to the horse using the three D modeling program blender. In addition to the cross sections, a visit to the Shelburne Museum just outside of Burlington, Vermont also guided our aesthetic choices when coloring the model. The Shelburne has 40 figures, an entire Carousel's worth made by a workshop that employed Daniel Mueller. Here is our finished model. Compared to how the horse appears today, it is bright and colorful, which was shocking to the curator who fell in love with the austere look and very serious appearance of what it looks like today. The final project I'm going to talk about is one I again worked on under Daniel supervision. This is a screen composed of molded pieces of Mahogany veneered plywood designed by the husband wife, duo Charles and Ray Eames. Charles and Ray Eames are considered some of the most influential designers of the 20th century. They're pioneers in the use of molded plywood, which they devise methods of manipulating into complex shapes. The screen has six segments, each shaped like an extruded bell curve. The segments are connected with strips of canvas, allowing the whole screen to fold down into the width of a single segment. Before treatment, the screen's main condition issues was disfiguring patches of over paint. It's not clear why the screen was over painted in these areas, but the patches are on both sides of the screen and seem to correspond with deep scratches. Locations of the over painted areas are more easily seen under UV light because they do not fluoresce. In contrast, the screens finish, here's a close up of one of those patches. Here's that patch under magnification. The material is opaque, hard, and glossy. The screen also had numerous scratches throughout in two sections. The canvas hinges had detached from their anchor points. The green fluorescence of the screen's finish under UV, suggested it contains cellulose nitrate. Conclusively identifying the finish was important because we determine which solvents could be used to address the over painted patches. I took a small sample of the screen's finish from its base to conduct the diphenyl ammine test for cellulose nitrate. The test strongly indicated the presence of cellulose nitrate aged nitrocellosefinishes can be incredibly sensitive. Identifying the finish as such eliminated the potential use of polar solvents on the screen. With this limited tool kit, I attempted to remove the patches of over paint with non polar solvents, but they had no effect. Because I couldn't safely remove the over paint. I decided instead to reduce its appearance by retouching using a non polar paint system. For this, I use my Mary tonic resin colors with shell Sal D 38 to conceal all 14 patches. Here's an example of a patch before and after treatment. Wood grain could have an almost velvety luminescence Colors shift depending on the light and your perspective. The my Mary paints dry to be fairly matt after painting. The next step was matching the surrounding glossiness of the screens finish. I did this with 20% PlexigumPQ. 611 in Shell, sold 38. The application of the plexigum turned out to be a challenge because it was in the same solvent that I used for my painting. My application had to be decisive and done in a single stroke to keep from solubilizing my previous work. I also use the 20% plexigum to saturate scratches in the finish causing them to disappear. With the over painted patches addressed, I could focus on reattaching the sections of hinge to their groove from the sides of the plywood segments. In the 1940s, the layers of Em's molted plywood furniture was laminated using urea formaldehyde, a thermoset resin. This adhesive was also used to originally attach the hinges. With this information, I tested a range of adhesives and application methods, arriving at Lesco 498 H injected with a syringe. Here is the screen after treatment, finally on display in the gallery. I'd like to thank all of these people for their help, advice, guidance, and support for these projects. Before I answer questions, I would also especially like to thank Megan Emery, Courtney Murray, and Meghan Randall for an incredible summer at the Midwest Art Conservation Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota for projects and stories. They will have to be saved for another time. And thank you for listening. Yes. Emily, a slide? Sure, I got a few so this might take a while. In the meantime, are there any other questions? Yes. Kathy, I'm touched with all your things you highlighted. I ask you for this. Can you talk about why you chose Sturgeon Glue over another? Yeah. Glue has a clarity that some of the other protein glues I was very worried about. There's that photo. Worried about the darkened area, areas of losses once they were consolidated, being much darker than their surroundings. In the end, this didn't turn out to be as much of a problem as I anticipated, but I think using a different glue could have contributed to additional darkening. Surging glue is also more refined than some other protein glues thought would hold up longer over time. All right, thank you so much.
Olav Bjornerud
From Robert Diiorio August 22, 2023
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