Beauty After Damage
As published in American Craft Council, August/September, 2020
THERE ARE SO MANY WAYS to describe the act of repairing something: to restore, reconstruct, rebuild, fix, mend, darn, patch, conserve, and heal, to name just a few. And there are nearly as many philosophies of repair that guide the professionals who bring objects back to life. The right approach depends on what the object is, where it lives, and who has been tasked with its care. Is it an article of cultural property that belongs in a museum and must be preserved? Or a potentially useful article that shouldn’t be allowed to go to waste? The question of whether an object needs to be preserved for posterity or rehabilitated and sent back out onto the field determines what kind of care it will get and what it will look like when the process is complete.
In a museum context, “repair” comes under two basic headings: conservation and restoration. The two aren’t easy to define or to totally distinguish from each other, but they are distinct. Conservation is the broader of the two, involving research, documentation, stabilization (making sure the object is strong and intact), and preservation – usually with the aid of materials science. It’s about the object in itself, as an entity that needs to stay safe through time and remain as true to its long-ago origins as it can. Restoration, on the other hand, is more focused on the look and function of the object, the effect of it on the viewer’s senses right now: Is it an effective visual/aural experience? Does it work, in every sense of the word, and thus produce delight?
Both practices may involve a form of repair that does its best to hide itself. But sometimes repair – and the story told by damage – wants to celebrate itself, too. Visible mending, which has a long history, particularly in Japanese textiles and ceramics, has come into prominence in recent years. Many contemporary proponents of the practice are driven by a desire to thwart the wasteful cycle of fast fashion, in which consumers purchase inexpensive clothing often manufactured in settings with dubious worker protections, then toss them after just a season or two, adding them to the planet’s waste stream. The style-setters of the visible mending world make a virtue of prominent fixes, which add to the story of an object and its beauty.
GETTING THE LEAD OUT: Conserving a Stained-Glass Treasure
DREW ANDERSON, A CONSERVATOR in the objects conservation department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, cares for the museum’s collection of stained glass, which includes beautiful treasures ranging from narrative windows crafted in medieval and Renaissance Europe to 19th-century Gothic Revival and art nouveau works designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Comfort Tiffany.
Anderson recently worked on a pair of late-15th century stained-glass panels –Storing up Manna and Gathering Manna, both from the Church of St. Salvator (or Salvatorkirche) in Munich, Germany. The panels depict scenes from the book of Exodus, in which the Israelites are collecting and keeping manna, the food God gave them during their 40-year journey across the desert on the way to Canaan. The panels likely came from the workshop of Friedrich Brunner. They are thought to have been badly damaged in the church before they were cut down into sections, removed, and later restored by Franz Xaver Zettler in 1906. Though conservation work is often discreet by design, Anderson’s recent work on Gathering Manna offers a vivid before-and-after that illustrates the goals of conservation in a museum display context.
As a conservator, Anderson’s basic focus is on the integrity of the object – keeping it safe and solid; this may involve undoing earlier repairs that threaten the object’s integrity. He is also intent on returning an object, as closely as possible, to the condition it was in when it left the artist’s workshop.
“[Conservation] is not some sort of creative artistic adventure. Decisions must be based on evidence.”
~DREW ANDERSON
A conservator’s focus on a piece like Gathering Manna might begin with lead, which forms the outline of the different elements in a scene, framing colored pieces of glass. Artists like Brunner would paint fine details onto the surface of the glass to shade characters’ faces or define the folds of their clothing. “In stained glass, much of the work we carry out is to reverse or remove previous [repair],” Anderson explains. “The only way to repair a break before the use of adhesives was to use another lead to hold the two sections together. As the window becomes more damaged, many additional (often disfiguring) leads are added, creating a confusing mix of intended and unintended leads.”
That’s what happened to Gathering Manna: By the time Anderson got to it, there were pieces of lead running across the figure in the upper right-hand corner that awkwardly overlapped the dark painted lines that illustrate his brown tunic. This kind of problem challenges a conservator to decide how to proceed, and in order to preserve the integrity of the object, the path forward must be paved with evidence. “[W]hen you are examining a window and deciding on a course of action, you try to consider what was the artist’s original intention,” says Anderson. “This is not some sort of creative artistic adventure. Decisions must be based on evidence.” If a piece of lead is running right through a figure’s face, for example, it’s a near certainty that this wasn’t part of the artist’s original design.
Anderson notes that in recent conservation history, ill-advised repairs were also sometimes made with glass, with colored infills added to fill gaps. If a figure’s face were damaged, he adds, sometimes a different face would simply be poached from another window – even one from another era – and set into the damaged window as a replacement. As he worked on Gathering Manna, Anderson was able to carefully remove the lead that was part of the old repair along with the old putty. He glued the broken pieces back together and filled remaining holes with a colored resin. After retouching the painted image, he placed the glass back into the original leads, which required some resoldering, copper mesh repair, and spot puttying.
Looking at Gathering Manna now – if you know where to look, that is – the faint appearance of slightly lighter-colored glass lines on the figure in the upper right- hand corner suggests the location of the old lead repairs. “No inpainting is done without clear evidence of what previously existed,” Anderson says, adding that extensive documentation of each step in the conservation process is made available to scholars and researchers when requested. Conservators must strike a balance: They need to ensure that their work is subtly evident and easily reversible, but not so obvious as to be distracting. “In the museum, the objects will be seen from very close. Conservation repairs will be immediately apparent, if they are not done in such a way as to disguise their existence.”
MAKING IT SING: Restoring a Music Box
BRITTANY NICOLE COX IS AN ANTIQUARIAN HOROLOGIST WITH special training in the repair of automata – or mechanical objects, including clocks. Fascinated by clockworks since childhood, she eventually enrolled in West Dean College of Arts and Conservation in England, one of the only places in the world where students can learn how to care for automata and antique clocks. Recently she’s been restoring a mechanical singing bird box for the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio for an upcoming exhibition on birding. Made in 1845 by Swiss-born Charles Bruguier, one of the foremost automata makers of his day, the box is silver with enameling, and a bird – complete with colorful feathers and a lifelike song – sings when you open the lid. Over time, these mechanical birds can stop working and begin to lose their feathers.
In the early modern period, Cox explains, automata were made using the best available technology at the time, which happened to be clockmaking. Timepieces were also entertainment. Automata were impressive, even dazzling, and a sophisticated host could astonish guests with the mechanical prowess and inventive design displayed by, say, an elaborate clock that could play a recognizable tune every hour on the hour.
“There’s something magical about being able to … [reanimate] something that’s been silent. It feels like I’m a magician or a doctor.”
~BRITTANY NICOLE COX
The Toledo bird clock presents Cox with a challenge that’s at the heart of restoration: While conservation emphasizes both the overall integrity of the piece and returning as closely as possible to the original maker’s intent, restoration focuses more closely on the look of the piece and its function. For Cox’s project, the main point of the singing bird box is the fact that, well, it sings, which means that the mechanical elements must work.
To restore it, Cox needed to take the box completely apart and rebuild the mechanism that animates the bird, including the tiny leather bellows that blows through a brass and steel slide whistle to produce the uncannily realistic birdsong. Rebuilding the bird also meant refeathering it, a painstaking process that begins by photographing the feathers, painting them with watercolors, and preparing a color schematic and layout. She trims and shapes each feather before placing it on the bird’s body according to the schematic. She sources these from antiques, but they’re hard to find and not without risk. “If I’m lucky, I find a Victorian taxidermy. But then you have issues that these birds were treated with arsenic.”
The thrill of seeing an object work again is something wondrous for Cox. “If [a mechanical object] has sat silent or dead so that it can’t fly or sing, there’s something magical about being able to restore that, reanimating something that’s been silent. It feels like I’m a magician or a doctor.”
CREATING A NEW BEAUTY, HONORING AN OLD ETHIC: Visible Mending
ONE OF THE IMPORTANT WAYS THAT CONSERVATION AND RESTORATION overlap is that both involve repair. Specialists like Cox and Anderson generally want the evidence of their work to fade into the background somewhat, so that viewers can take in a work of art without distraction. But for other artisans old and new, the signs of repair actually add beauty – and an ethical dimension – to textiles.
Earlier this year, the Japan Society in New York presented the exhibition “Boro Textiles: Sustainable Aesthetics,” which featured examples of the mended and re-mended quilts and clothing that Japanese artisans have crafted for centuries. Peasants in Tohoku in northern Japan would embroider, mend, and reuse textiles over and over, adding layers to make them extra warm over time. The fixes also add a quality rooted in one of the most significant traditions of Japanese aesthetics, wabi-sabi, the understated beauty of the aged, the imperfect, the faded. The patchwork of mending subtly contributes animation and unpredictability, too, creating a complex loveliness.
The word “boro” literally means “rag” or “tatters,” but the practice has given rise to its own aesthetic, one adopted by contemporary fashion designers and DIY menders alike. For self-described “mindful menders,” repair creates a kind of visual language that spreads the word about the importance of reuse in the age of climate change.
“[My grandparents’ generation was] more connected to the labor of making and valued things differently because they had experienced scarcity. ‘Make do and mend’ was a popular sentiment at the time.”
~LILY FULOP
Designer and writer Lily Fulop, who runs the @mindful_mending account on Instagram, published Wear, Repair, Repurpose: A Maker’s Guide to Mending and Upcycling Clothes this past spring. She teaches readers techniques that they might not have even heard of, even if their great grandparents were likely experts: darning socks, hemming pants, crocheting pillows, braiding rugs, and embroidering over stains and imperfections.
Wartime and Depressionera austerity made creative reuse and careful repair simple necessities of life. “[M]y grandparents’ generation approached consumption much differently, as a result of experiencing the Great Depression and rationing of World War II and growing up before goods were mass produced so cheaply – and so far away,” Fulop says. “They were more connected to the labor of making and valued things differently because they had experienced scarcity. ‘Make do and mend’ was a popular sentiment at the time, which was all about necessity.” Both of Fulop’s grandmothers knitted and crocheted, and her mother sewed clothes and quilted, but they hadn’t encouraged her to explore those skills and were pleasantly surprised by her interest in them. Fulop discovered knitting and sewing with a sense of fun, but it has become her calling. “I took it up as a hobby,” she says. “Now, it’s a form of activism.”
The accelerating threat of climate change presents a stark challenge when it comes to steering consumers away from waste. With clothing that’s so abundant and inexpensive, taking the time (and developing the skills) to reuse something old can seem hard to justify. Fulop hopes to change that by making mending an outlet for creative inspiration, technical mastery, and the beauty of imperfection.
“I took it up as a hobby,” Fulop says of visible mending. “Now, it’s a form of activism.”
She notes that the limitations caused by the COVID-19 pandemic – from stay-at-home orders to social distancing to the sudden scarcity of certain goods – has had a bracing effect on generations that have relatively little experience with national exercises in austerity. “People value goods in a new way – what is essential, and what isn’t. Plus, many people have lost their sources of income, so they certainly won’t be buying unnecessary products. For those of us still with jobs where we can work from home, we may still have money to buy new clothes, but we have no reason to because we’re not going anywhere.” And, she points out, the art of mending itself is on the rise as more people are turning to sewing and knitting while spending more time at home.
The approaches that these experts take are diverse and distinctive, but they all have in common a commitment to preserving something that has beauty and cultural value and to sharing it with the world. Whether that means people can admire something in a museum or a gallery, wear it or use it again after rescuing it, or be moved to refashion something by hand using a newly acquired skill, the powers inherent in conservation, restoration, and visible mending can be inspiring practices – sources of beauty and, in a special way, of truth.
Manna photo: Courtesy of Drew Anderson / Other photos: Ben Lindbloom