Collections Curator Issy Bloomfield shares news of the Museum’s work to improve our team’s conservation knowledge so we can all get skills to better look after our collections.

Back in May we were pleased to welcome back Conservation Development Officer for Museum Development South West (MDSW) Helena Jaeschke to give us further object care and conservation support as part of the Farmers Will Like It project. Helena led a group of museum volunteers through training in object cleaning and treatment, so we can continue to progress with our Collections Care.

We learnt how to carefully assess an object’s condition and materials in order to make a plan for how best to protect it from the museum’s environmental factors. This involved learning different cleaning techniques, and how to apply Renaissance Wax, a museum specific wax to protect objects from dust and environmental changes. The museum has thousands of objects on open display so this treatment will be so helpful to use to better protect them.

Since the training, a team of volunteers have already been working on caring for a collection of objects from one of our displays and we’re really impressed by the results!

Helena also held a mount making design and making session with us and a small group of other local museum professionals. We developed plans for how we would mount different objects using a variety of materials. We learnt how to shape Perspex to make display mounts and we are looking forward to putting this to use in the museum in the future.

The team here at the museum really value the time to ask Helena questions on how to best care for our large and varied collection, and after each visit, we feel a little more confident on how to proceed.