 annual mistakes event, a failure shared is not a failure learning from our mistakes. I want to also thank Ruth Seiler and the AIC meeting team for finding a place for us in in what has become a very busy meeting schedule and Kari Rainer and I also want to give a big shout out to Rebecca Gridley who co-organized and presented this event with us for the past four years. So after five years this seems to be becoming a durable part of our AIC meetings and we're very glad of that. The demographic of our speakers has been evolving. In the first few years they were more older and more established conservators, maybe willing to take the risk. But now we're hearing from many younger and emerging conservators which is exactly what we've been hoping for. This suggests that the discussion of our mistakes is becoming normalized in our profession. And here's another good sign of this evolution. The recent publication of Michelle Merencola and Lucretia Carger's landmark book, The Conservation of Medieval Polychrome Sculpture, History, Theory, and Practice includes a section entitled Coda Making Mistakes. So that's great. This may be part of a larger trend. Oh I see, I can see what's going on over there. It's only taken the Harvard Business Review five years to catch up with the AIC as indicated by their current summer 2022 special issue, How to Recover from Failure, which my wife Jennifer gets all the credit for discovering this in the checkout line in the magazine rack at the grocery store, Whole Foods of course. So there are lots of very practical useful articles and a thoughtful exploration of the same kind of ideas that we talk about here, albeit in a business context. I have to say there are pretty sloppy joins on that bust. And what's with the no-name proprietary PVA emulsion adhesive? I don't think so. Finally, if I'm going to talk the talk, I have to walk the walk. Here's my latest mistake. For the last several years, COVID permitting, we've been working on a large porcelain exhibition and I've been carrying out a variety of larger and smaller treatments on mice and porcelain. Last week after successfully steam cleaning dozens of pieces with absolutely no issues, I accidentally blasted an area. Original gilding off the foot rim of this small tea cup. No excuses. I was overconfident working quickly. I failed to adequately protect this vulnerable area. I can think of many ways to have prevented this, including simply not going for such a high level of cleaning on such a piece with possibly fragile decoration. Now, I'd like to introduce my co-organizer, Carrie Rainer, who will introduce our first speaker in keeping with our bio technique. I'll say that over the last few years, Carrie has been part of a book club of two, consisting of herself and her brother. The book club has recently been re-embracing a childhood love of fantasy and science fiction. Recent series Carrie has enjoyed include The Name of the Wind, Locke Lamora, and Red Rising. So please welcome Carrie to the podium. Carrie. All right. Thanks so much, Tony. Next up, we have Sarah Castro. Sarah is from Buckeye Lake, Ohio. At age eight, she qualified for an Ohio Division of Wildlife Angler Award with a 12 pound 32 inch carp. Impressive. She received an excellent award in the sixth grade science fair for her research on origami and for developing the paper folding skills to create not only paper cranes, but origami astronauts. At age 15, she begged her parents for an acoustic guitar, which she still plays today. All right, everyone, please welcome Sarah. I'm going to speak to you about a study of several mistakes today, and I'm going to discuss a work by an Indigenous artist, so I'm going to give you a very quick little land acknowledgement in my own style. I mentioned in my bio that I'm from Buckeye Lake, Ohio, and that is in Licking County, Ohio, which is home to the largest set of geometric earthen enclosures in the world. It's built by the people of the ancient Hopewell culture before CE400, and their names for the white settler on whose land they were first excavated. They comprised more than four square miles, but over the years the city of the Newark, Ohio, destroyed and now covers most of those original earthen structures. The largest remaining segment is Aligns with the Moonrise and Moonset over an 18-year period, and it has survived because it is the site of a golf course. So if you look that up, it is a candidate for a UNESCO World Heritage site, but it keeps getting denied because the golf course won't get off. So I will now go on to a study of several mistakes. I'm going to get my notes. This is a work by Shane Gosshorn, who is a native artist, and these are made from two portraits of Hastin Tohali, who is better known as Tom Torlino. These images were famously used to promote the Carlisle Indian School's assimilation-based motto, kill the Indian to save the man. These images were taken three years apart before and after entering the school, and I will note if you've researched Tom Torlino, he left the school and went right back to his community, became a rancher and a medicine man, and used his education to further the communication with the western colonists and his people. This work is comprised of two inkjet print components, two larger portraits of the 1882 and 1885 images woven together, and underneath it a larger print, which has the two portraits printed separately so you can see them. The woven print was adhered with double-sided tape to a foam core spacer between the two to create this floating effect. As soon as this work was installed in our galleries and the exhibition was open to the public, I went on vacation. And my birthday in the Finger Lakes with my girlfriends, it was fine, and 10 out of 10 recommend going to the Finger Lakes, just rent a cabin on Airbnb, it's great. And I will also say not only did I go to the Finger Lakes, I went back to Buckeye Lake, Ohio, where I rode along as my five-month-old niece took her first boat ride as the fifth generation of castos to boat on Buckeye Lake. And on this very day, the mounting tape failed, and the woven component of the work fell to the bottom of the frame on the wall. Fortunately, the work was not damaged, but I cannot say the same about myself. So the mistakes were these. First, this is a study. It's in the title, study. Gosshorn usually wove images into basket shaped works. So flat-framed works were not her usual format. This was a study or a prototype, and it was not typical for the artist. Second, this was a gift from the artist to the curator, who then in turn donated it to the museum. And she communicated this work's experimental nature to her colleagues when it was acquired, but I was not yet a staff member at the museum when this happened, and for some reason that information was known but not included in the database record. And third, I did not ask the curator for any details about this piece beyond what I read in the database record. Fourth, and finally, I examined this piece prior to exhibition in our collection galleries, and I read that the top right of the woven print was slightly lifting. So the double-sided tape was visible. I saw this, and I pressed it down to read here the work, and then I checked the perimeter with a spatula and decided that it was securely adhered. Was it? No. It was not. I assumed that the tape used to mount this object was purposefully chosen and sufficient to secure the work as it hung vertically in the gallery, and I was very wrong. And not only did it fail, it failed while I was out of town and out of the office, meaning that the conservator who examined this, me, was not the one that had to address this failure, but instead my supervisor, conservator in charge, Tyna Miller, and our head preparator, Emily Phoenix. And that is why their name is on this slide. The treatment required a slow and methodical backing removal of a foam core support board, removal of several types of tape from the back of the spacer and the front and back of the bottom most print. And they were doing this on a Monday when we were closed because nothing is more annoying to the rest of the staff in the museum than they removed from the gallery card on the wall while we're open. But Tyna and Emily were innovative, and they devised this elegant yet simple way to remount the work without applying any additional tapes or adhesives to the surface of the larger print on the bottom. They used these rare earth magnets. They placed four magnets inside the back of a new eight ply mat board spacer replacing the old poor quality foam core original. And in the front of the new mat board backing board, and they put little sink holes and covered these magnets with filmoplast P90 tape into the small holes that they cut out. Tyna also applied Japanese paper hinges with wheat starch paste to the verso of the woven component, which as you know requires drying time. And then she wrapped the hinges around that mat board platform and secured those with P90 tape. Finally, folded paper corners secured the larger print to the backing board over the magnets. And the magnets in the back of the spacer on the woven component held it in place. So this was a very elegant and quickly thought out process and they saved me. So as you can see there were several small mistakes that could have prevented this failure and most of them were mine. And there were several ways that Tyna and Emily could have approached this unexpected failure, but not only were my colleagues understanding, they did not even copy me on any emails about this disaster because they knew I would see it and be sick for the rest of my trip. They rose above and beyond to quickly improve this object's housing in an elegant and innovative way that was incredibly successful. And they're wonderful colleagues and friends and I'm lucky to work with them in all successes and failures. Thank you. Thank you very much, Sarah. That was great. Our next speaker is Netanya Schiff. Netanya grew up in the Pacific Northwest and had holes in her jeans before she was old enough to know it was cool. She's an expert midday napper, will try most things twice, and is an avid collector of unusual things she finds on the street. Welcome, Netanya. Hi. There's a lot of you here. So I'm going to talk about a mistake I made during graduate school. It's a two-part mistake, so that'll be fun. So this was one of the objects I worked on during our studio lab year in my MSc at University College London, and it was a block-lifted Roman floor mosaic. It had been lifted by archaeologists overseen by the Museum of London. And if you don't know, the Museum of London is the repository of all things archaeological within London. So they have a lot of things in their collection, and occasionally do have to deaccession things, which was the case with this object. It was deaccessioned because it had no archaeological context connected to it in 2013. It was donated to University College London Institute of Archaeology for student work, and I am the student that took it on. How does this work? Oh, okay, good. So the whole object was pretty much held together by the facing material, which was a cotton netting with what looked like a flexible plastic sheeting and a PVA adhesive, bind flex, which was used at the time. That had remained on the object since it had been lifted in 1995, and that was, 2016 was when I was looking at it, so it was about 20 years, is that correct? And as you can see, like the mortar itself, the bedding mortar, and the finer mortar used to keep the tessera intact are completely disintegrating. So I came up with this really cool idea that was inspired by something I'd seen at the British Museum, where they had wall painting fragments, which you could view from the front and the back, and I got very excited about using this object as a didactic and didn't think through the fact that those fragments were about a tenth of the size and much lighter. And what I wanted to try to do was an experimental treatment where instead of using an epoxy or something like a plastic adhesive, I would try consolidating the back with nanolimes, and I chose Cowacil, which is a trade name for a nanolime dispersion, and created a chamber where I placed the object, so you can see these cups are, they're weighted down with sand, there's water underneath, there was a Corex board with holes drilled, the object was placed on top, the chamber's closed, and then I drilled a hole in the bottom so I could stick in a hygrometer probe and check the humidity. And one thing to know about the nanolimes is that it's very important that you get your relative humidity above 60% or the solution won't enter into the object and allow for basically the calcium hydroxide to precipitate into calcium carbonate. So this was left in its box for about a week. I was monitoring the humidity and at one point it jumped up to 90%, but based on talking with another person at UCL, they had said they thought it was fine, and then I went to take it out of the box and the nanolimes had worked really well. They had worked so well that they precipitated over the entire objects, and they're completely insoluble. So I basically had to end up removing them mechanically from the tessera and some of the backing mortar so that the object could be viewed in the way that I wanted it to be viewed, which was as a didactic from the front and the back. So I went ahead and did that and then sadly had to fill the back with a Paralloid B72 bulked in micro balloons, which I was hoping to not have to do, and also consolidate it with a Primal B60, I believe. So I did that on the back before removing the face thinking that was this really smart thing to do, and then I went to remove the the facing material, and I did that with a Lapinite poultice with a mix of water and denatured alcohol, and left that on for about two hours, and it did a really great job of removing the facing material and all of my fills. So I ended up having to refill the whole object from the front and the back to stabilize it, and then continued to work on this object and was under a lot of time pressure, so ended up having to do quite a lot more interventive treatment than I would have liked, and it was a little bit frustrating that I couldn't just use epoxy, honestly, which my professors didn't want me to use for understandable reasons, but yeah. So I ended up with something like this. So as you can see, the airbrace was actually clean quite a lot of the incrustation as well from burial, so there was some advantage there because you could see the color of the individual tessera, but as you can see, it's significantly filled at this point. I did have a lot of obviously loose samples, so if someone did at any point want to do analysis, they could, although as I said, it's without context, so this is unlikely. And I did just basically a Japanese tissue around the edge and then B72 and then Fluger, so the idea was that you would be able to pick up the object and turn it over, potentially with a box to kind of assist, and I'm going to be honest, I never finished this. So it's sitting in a closet at UCL. It's stable. The facing's removed and it needs a little more work, and I tried to convince a student a couple years ago when I went back to do it, and I'd be like, we know we can write a paper about it, it'll be really great, and she looked at it and she was like, no. So one day I really hope to go back and finish this project, but I learned a lot of very important lessons and sadly, after the fact, I learned that this isn't uncommon with the nanolimes, that if it's not controlled, if you're not really on top of it, this can happen. They can precipitate out and become insoluble across. So yes. Thank you. Thank you so much, Natanya. Next up we have Chris Swan, who is also here with us virtually. I think I saw him in the chat though, so he's watching us, I think. Can we please get his? Yes. So this is Chris's bio. Chris is a member of Rock On Second Wind Band, Virginia, and Antique Vehicle Blues Band. So that's him on bass guitar, which is a custom built instrument. Very cool. And so we have pre-recorded Chris's talk, and we'll play that now. It was heard only some number of years ago that I have participated in, and it concerns a North Carolina cupboard. So the themes of this little short talk are essentially how security and safety and non-invasive approaches can be useful, and in some cases sometimes not make quite as much sense as we would like in an ideal setting. So furniture as a subset of the mechanical arts is something that we're constantly challenged with the usefulness and the interaction with these objects, and that's why I'm sharing this little bit of information with you today. So this is a North Carolina dresser, a kitchen cupboard, essentially, which was brightly painted when it was new. This is yellow pine, and it has these unusual hinges called rat tail hinges, so-called. They're essentially pintle hinges with a pintle and a strap attached each to the panel in the door. So this particular cabinet was missing these pintle hinges. I showed you an after treatment picture there before, but this was how we got it, and we could see the clear evidence here of the outline, I think as the arrows point to, of that Germanic style hinge that was so typical of these back country Carolina type of objects. So this 20th century butt hinge just didn't- Curator was just not happy with this presentation, and so we proceeded to have the cat, the iron, the blacksmiths here at CW, make a custom set of hinges like you see here in the photo, following some careful measurements of the outline and the holes, etc. Essentially the pintle as you see has a curvature that resembles a rat's tail with a hole at the bottom for the nail and then a pin that goes into the wood closer to the top, and that's what secures the hinge. So here's the problem. We had a set of these hinges custom made like you see here, only we decided to make this a very convoluted false hinge with the idea that we could prevent anyone from opening or getting into the cabinet who was unauthorized and make this also a non-invasive attachment where the hinge, big hinge nails wouldn't be driven into the wood again, but they would be fixed with some much smaller pins that were custom soldered to the back of these hinges, and here's a detail you can see here where the side view of one of those hinges. So what we did was we actually sawed apart the pintle near the top here just under where it would have gone through so that it appeared to be a solid functioning hinge, but in fact the door could simply be lifted off or even just pulled off of the style. And then in addition to the false hinge, a very convoluted set of blocks and framework were made for the back of the doors, essentially holding the doors in place. So with a toggle blocks that were toggle like that could be twisted and held in place, and a very secretive latch on the right hand side that you had to know about and was recorded in the record, of course, all written up in the report. In order to get into the right hand door, the latch had to be pulled out, then you could carefully pull the door off of the cabinet, then you could reach in and reach around to the left door and remove the left door by rotating toggles and so on. So needless to say, at one point, some years later after this treatment, an unsuspecting curator tried to open the door and it fell off in his or her hands, and so you see the problem or the mistake in this kind of an approach of not making something so functional be what it appears to be and knowing that it might very well be used for how it was appeared to be used. So you see the problem and I think this is the issue then is to sort of think through the non-invasive and the accessibility and the security and really take a hard look at the long-term survival and preservation of these objects physically. You have to sometimes bite the bullet. So that's what we have. We remade the hinges in the proper way and attach them with with nails in the original holes that would secure the heavy yellow pine doors for the long-term. Here it is in the gallery in our rich and varied culture gallery, the back country section as you see it there on the right displaying some beautiful slipwear and representing that North Carolina style for the long-term. So that's what I have for my mistake. Hope you can learn from that and good luck to you and all of your projects like this. Thank you. Well I've never designed an overcomplicated treatment. Our next speaker is Nancy Pollock. Nancy says books are her drug of choice and she is currently reading a biography of Elizabeth Ann Sutton during her downtime listening to the Dublin Murder Squad series while working, I love that series, and buying board books for her new granddaughter anytime she finds a good one. Recommendations are welcome. Please welcome Nancy. Thank you. So this is the story of one of my rare on-site painting treatments and the lessons I learned about communication when you are not working by yourself in your solo private practice. Mr. and Mrs. Client were experienced in house rehabilitations. In the process of interviewing former residents of their current home, a 19th century farmhouse, they were asked if they had seen the mural above the fireplace. Rushing back to their house they began exploring the lumpy layers spackle over the mantle and found the mural. They brought me in and I opened some cleaning windows to help them determine the edges of the mural. Ten years later the house was finished and they were ready to have the mural treated. Even in its decidedly less than perfect state, they had embraced the mural, a fixing a frame and often telling the story of their discovery. My 2021 treatment included three main issues with the mural, flaking paint, a substantial dirt layer and evidence of old damages. I worked on site a few days a week. Mr. and Mrs. Client were both usually at home and regularly checked in and discussed the project with me as I worked. After flaking paint was stabilized I was ready to begin the cleaning. I started with small tests and ramped up from there discussing the process, the goals of cleaning and the extent of cleaning with Mr. and Mrs. Client. We settled on an extensive but not total cleaning and I was ready to begin. Mrs. Client spent much of the time with me. It was very satisfied with the progress. At the end of the first full day of cleaning I too thought things were going well. I took some good during treatment photos. You know the kind. We all have them somewhere in our slide decks. Face it, during treatment photos are glamour shots for conservators. And I'm not sure how good of this shot is viewing up here. I was almost a little worried that this might not be a glamour shot but a high school yearbook photo. So sorry. The next day I arrived happy and ready to continue. But there was a much quieter vibe in the air. As I set up for the day Mrs. Client came in somewhat embarrassed. I think this is going really well she said. But Mr. Client is worried. You're going too far and taking off paint. As she trailed off thoughts were racing through my head. Oh crap. Is he right? And then what's the best way to in paint dirt? Then I took a breath and two more thoughts came to mind. Oh crap. And more helpfully wait a minute. If I'm leaving a layer of dirt can I really be taking off original paint? As I was working through these thoughts Mr. Client came in and we started to talk. He explained to me what he was seeing and his concerns. As he talked I realized that he thought the surface he was viewing right then was the final product. While I was viewing it as one of many intermediary steps which would produce a different appearance in the end. And then it hit me. He was watching how the sausage gets made and he was ready to become a vegetarian. I was used to clients who dropped off befores and picked up afters without being present for all the in-between steps. Mr. Client on the other hand had a front row seat for every little step and also was able to spend long hours after I left just looking. So we started to work through his concerns. For instance to him the surface looked chalky dry and faded. I knew that was because of remaining grime future steps I would take to finally clear the surface and later varnishing of the painting. But I had not verbalized any of that before. So simply wetting the surface with solvent to give an idea of how it would look after the future steps served to allay many of those concerns. Other things that were obvious to me were not to him. For instance when you have restorations even ones done in crayon it's likely done because there's damage to the original surface. Mr. Client watched as I removed some of that crayon which did produce spectacular blue swabs something that could be a little nerve wracking if glanced at while passing through and he saw that the crayon came off while the paint stayed a huge sigh of relief. That night I put together a slideshow better explaining the cleaning process with lots more during images. This helped Mr. and Mrs. Client both see the process in a different light. When it came time to discuss in-painting options I used another slideshow to guide our discussion. The moral of this part of the story is during treatment detail shots can be useful no matter where you are in your career. I also realized that as a conservator I'm used to being extremely circumspect in my discussions. I say this appears to be overpaint which can sound uncertain. When I should actually say this appears to be overpaint because it is painted across this big white hole in the painting. In the end we decided to continue cleaning as started and the treatment came to a mutually happy conclusion. I came away with two cherished clients and they are reveling in this new chapter in the story of their mural. I did learn some important lessons. Now when talking to clients I try to give them more of an idea of what they should expect such as it's unlikely your great grandfather's complexion was that shade of yellow-orange. Just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder so is the conservation process and I've learned that a little more talking and some really great photos can help my clients and me see eye to eye. Thank you very much for that talk Nancy. Our next speaker is Francesca Sousa. Francesca loves David Lynch movies and is sure they're about quantum physics. She lives in sunny Lisbon also known as Europe's California a U.S. state that she adores. Some friends call her palm because of the way her hair cascades like a palm tree. Welcome Francesca. Okay hi everyone so I flew all the way from Lisbon to be here and it's my first day I see so please be gentle. So the title of this presentation it's not denial I'm just very selective about the reality I accept was stolen from the comic Calvin from Calvin Hobbes it's actually Calvin who says that and a story about doing the right thing by mistake is my subtitle because that's at least the way I see it as you will see now. So to start I'm trying to be serious here to start it's important to note that the middle of the 20th century showed us that the positivist vision of reality may indeed be biased and post structuralist philosophers like Foucault and Derrida point out how how our truth informed ideas may be in fact misunderstandings of the world or at least just one way of understanding it. So I would like to think with this meme okay you may not be doing it wrong if no one knows what you're doing but may you also be doing it wrong if you and others believe to know what you're doing to reflect on this with a particular episode of my career I will take you back to 2014 to the exhibition from head to tail by a now well-known Portuguese artist Carla Philippe. This show fitted the program for new commissions with emerging Portuguese artists at Museu Culeção Brardo an internationally acclaimed institution with one of the most relevant modern and contemporary art collections in Portugal with highly valued works by Duchamp Picasso Warhol to name a few. As you see in this exhibition view several wooden elements were presented these were assembled in situ by the artist following the idea of having the whole exhibition as a single thorough installation piece. The problem was here comes the mistake the producer of the show told me that the artist would bring elements from her studio but no details were given and I did not insist on the details assuming they would be studio elements so naive right Bruce Nauman has shown us more than six years ago that everything the artist does inside his studio is art so art elements can be anything. Second mistake not knowing as much as one should about the artist's project and overall artistic intentions this one was a political reflection on how on the abandoned state of national railways considered an obsolete means of transport actually the opposite is happening now as you know. I instantly panicked as I'm sure my fellow conservators understand and a stream of thoughts kept piling up inside my head okay chill these things are not classic artworks okay panic there's two Picasso's upstairs you'll have pests all over the museum okay chill the bugs will chew on this first they're comfy here and you know it was probably one of the longest five minutes of my career and then I called the pest control company the solution was to enclose these parts in a separate room that was not being used and fumigate them for 48 hours okay done and hopefully the bugs won't come back during three months I thought they didn't by the way two days after another transport arrives the truck's door open a ravishing green interior surprises me many vases with living plants also picked up on abandoned train stations since these ones could not be killed and had to be kept well during the exhibition a weekly pest control spray was applied by me also considering the presence of visitors and staff gladly this was shown in its own room separate from the rest of the exhibition pieces and away from the entry of the show as you see there's a lot of vagueness in these comments of mine and the biggest struggle was really the one inside my head trying to apply science to these very improvised actions with the bits of intuition the day of the opening as I am reviewing everything I spot a lizard coming down from the vases now that's a species I've never seen in textbooks about about pest controls at least not in european ones I would even think of it as a pest control in that of itself right I kindly ask my colleague to gently invite the lizard to leave and have a happy life on the outside world Karla the artist when I told her about this was ecstatic oh my a lizard in a show called from head to tail how could it be better so if I try to put this mistake in a scheme something like this would appear I had an incomplete list of works I had this concept of making the whole the whole exhibition as an installation piece and I didn't know where these pieces were coming from and I have I had of course short time to solve the problem as always so I had to to choose non-classical conservation decisions namely the toxic fumigation to protect the remaining artworks but also considering the presence of visitors and staff um now let's travel travel further to 2021 on a workshop on artists interviews I met Karla again because she would be one of the subjects being interviewed at the end of the exercise Karla mentioned this installation piece that you are seeing here titled migration exclusion and resistance that includes edible weeds and that she showed in Sao Paulo Brazil and in Porto Portugal the second venue in Portugal did not allow her to give access to visitors eating the weeds as her intention determines therefore she thought that the piece was not installed in port not well installed in port that it was in a way frozen by the institutional structure and this is an idea that I've heard often from artists I then shared this 2014 trauma of mine with the whole audience and she very happily replied oh yes I was so lucky so let's circle back to the meme I knew what I as a preventive conservator should have done I should know the nature and condition of the objects that were entering the museum and I should have brought them to anoxia if time was not available I tend to believe this would be the case I should have said to Karla there's no way you can bring these things inside a museum space what a real shame it would have been so the end of the story is that you may be doing it right even if you don't know what you're doing thank you very much