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Our third speaker in our little mini session is Ron Harvey the conservator at Tuckerbrook
Conservation, the conservation company out of Lincolnville, Maine. We've worked together
on a number of different projects over the years, everything from dreadful caulk removal
projects in Petersburg, Virginia, to wonderful projects like the one that Ron's going to
tell you about today, so let'*** it. Harvey: Thank you, could we have the lights
down please? So Dennis had called me and asked four conservators to come in and do a kabala
looking at the Vollis Simpson pieces early on, and whether I won or lost, I was the only
one that showed up. So this has become one of my most endearing, and challenging, projects
in my 32 year career. What the challenge is, is twofold; one is that we're looking at moving
objects that normally would not be moved. Many of you that have spoken today are talking
about artifacts and buildings and structures and art objects that are not movable and are
in their original place. Well, we have the opportunity with this project to take them
down and to move them. In the process of moving them we can move them literally and figuratively,
into the conservation facility, but also be able to move them to a point where they will
be able to remain mechanically functional and aesthetically appropriate and the aesthetically
appropriate is the harder of the two issues in my opinion.
So, I was brought on site and we ended up going up into a cherry picker and running
around looking at these objects and doing a quick site survey and going okay, these
are incredibly complex large functional objects with many, many layers of attachment including
paint and pigment. You see in the distance they become these linear drawings in air that
are then activated by the wind. Another view from the park that you won't get to see in
another year as I said, they are coming down and they will move into downtown Wilson.
So the closer I got the scarier it became. You see sections of lost paint and rust which
we expect, because there was very little maintenance other than lubrication of functioning movable
parts. These attachments, Vollis certainly was a scavenger and used and picked materials
and blended them in ways that are both unique, and in terms of conservation, challenging.
I want you to try to remember this horizontal element of the Simpson and how it's rusted.
Dennis showed you an earlier photograph that showed it with some level of pigment, and
Jeff had asked Vollis because I said, "Jeff, was this ever painted?" So he asked Vollis
and Vollis said, "I never painted it, "but it had been painted.
So again, as Jeff was saying, being a Yankee coming down and then trying to immediately
make some contact with Vollis to ask questions, in a couched but appropriate way, to understand
what he wants in terms of the appearance of these. He would, as Jeff said, would be very
vague or he would say, "Well, when we talked about moving," he said," If you chose one
to move it will be wrong, and if I chose one to move it will be wrong." So there you have
it. Again, we had this amazing facility and it really is a conservation dream to have
as much space as we need close to the area where they will be relocated on Barnes Street.
Again, it started out as empty spaces. There was a lot of publicity and this is a
local paper, and I use this always as a touchstone because we talk about conservation. Now, there's
an element of restoration and then this new concept for this group who's involved with
the Whirligig Project in Wilson, the Downtown Development Group, so you have conservation
is kind of the new theme. So again, it's educating on both sides of the road and trying to cut
a swath and everyone's saying, "But we need to do this quickly, we need to employ people,
we need to move ahead, what can you do? How can you make these work?"
So by moving these down into the Barnes Street facility, the photograph on your right shows
the pieces sort of sitting on odd, extraneous material. Not safe and Danny Price is the
lead guy in terms of the mechanical repairs. Really is a great guy, 30 years working for
Bridgestone, and he developed mounting systems on wheels. So not only are they safe, so the
theme of health and human safety runs throughout this concept of both conservation and preservation,
plus the objects and the public. Because this is going to go into a public space. It's transcending
from being artist owned to public owned. So Danny ended up creating these so pieces could
be moved around and worked on and not be damaged as they are going through process.
Again, just an overview. I want you to take note of the guy on the bicycle, the rust guy,
basically. Again, here's that large horizontal section of the Simpson in the conservation
lab. So my question was, "How do you want it to look?" As a conservator I'm trained
to deal with providing information and ideally treatments ,which are a long term stable,
re-treatable and fall within certainly the code of ethics, but also with this project
give us at least a 20 to 25 year lifespan before they have to be replaced.
So the question was, what time period do you want to interpret these and what should the
surface look like? In the back of my brain I'm saying to myself, I'll ask these questions,
but I'm not going to answer them because these are curatorial questions. I pleaded in many
different routes to have more of a curatorial input. If I'm going to go before the firing
squad, I want company. No one's laughing. Again this fragility, these are bicycle tires
that are probably 30-50% rust. And there's always the PR. Whenever we would come on site
and realize on this project, I would come on site for two days twice a year. In those
two days, Dennis and I are trying to get a weeks worth of work done, plus we would have
PR things that we have to stop for, like these photographs. We'd be interviewed. There was
a videographer that was going through this whole process, so, and then there were events
in the evening. It didn't give us a lot of time to scheme. Some of the folks working
on this project. So again, and before curatorial presence,
we had Brendan, who was with the State Arts Council and he was certainly willing to at
least take temporary control of curation but knew also his limits. So whether we developed
that as a strategy to sort of slow things down. So we picked pieces which were more
straight forward, complex yes, but more straightforward, in terms of these boxed units that are wood
with attachments, reflector attachments and then many components of stainless steel.
My concern about the mounting system was not only the aesthetics of what they should look
like but also the health and human safety aspects. Again, early on, wanted someone who
was a certified welder to review all the welds, because again, these are going into a public
space and they become the liability for the city of Wilson.
And then we had painted surfaces and everything from intact to nonexistent, and the most challenging
are these areas where we've got rust going underneath painted surfaces, original painted
surfaces. You've got areas where Vollis would paint with no primer, on either metal or aluminum,
and literally the paint just flakes. And then we've got the areas where it's, as Dennis
coined the phrase, the hand of Vollis, where it's actually seen elements that he attached
or went into with a brush or with a stick and paint, and complimented, or did fill in
areas. There's pencil marks and the remains of the paint, and have a nice day. On these
attachments and elements that were moveable, like these hands and arms, the reflective
surfaces but then going in and really adding more. These are very, very, fragile surfaces,
and so as a conservator, you know banging my head against the wall saying why? Why me?
And again the variations, how do you want the paint to look? What paint do you want?
What level of interpretation? We have the advantage of, through Jeff, of having Vollis
be able to provide materials. These are rollers, these little guys on the front that are part
of a textile manufacturing equipment and Vollis would stockpile and you can see piles of them
in his shop, and so I was saying to Jeff, " Get as many as you can, start stockpiling
materials, because we need to think in terms of long term preservation and repair of these
pieces." Again, what they were doing was replacing
bearings, failed materials, missing, or worn shafts, and using metal that was about the
same dimension and using bearings that were sealed to reduce the amount of lubrication
needs and then where they needed to do lubrication, they would include little stop gaps, so they
could go in and then lubricate. Then the mechanical folks are going to come up with a system,
in terms of maintenance, on the mechanical size for each of the whirligigs. So there
is going to be a map and basically a large preservation and maintenance manual.
There's some simple tests and cleaning surfaces, so that when I'm not there work still has
to continue. I'm not there very often, for four days out of the year last year. So looking
at cleaning systems that were both nonthreatening either to the object or to the staff. I did
some coating treatments thinking alright, if you want these to look the way they are,
let me look, start looking at systems that at least would maybe give us five year life
expectancy. I did some testing in terms of clear coats, if you wanted rust areas, there
is clear coat systems that we can put over that would give us probably 10 to 15 years
life expectancy, yet we could map them out so that again, it would appear like a rusted
surface. But without that curatorial input, I'm not making the call. We did our six month
field test, which we all know is nothing, but at least it slowed down the process and
again, keeping Vollis informed, and asking him, engaging him, and also respecting his
wishes. So what am I going to do in terms of conservation?
Tada! My request, my need for curatorial input was solved when Brooke was brought into the
project, bless her soul. So here's a person who had been curator at the Folk Art Museum
in New York, now is at LACMA, has a strong and well grounded understanding of outsider
art. So we spent the day looking at the objects, both here and also at Vollis', and looking
at the complexity. We see areas where when you remove the reflectors you see original
paint, so at least that helps us in terms of what it originally looked like, Brooke,
should we repaint these? And then we have these other areas, which are hand of Vollis,
where there's these really minute, fragile details that have been applied and I'm scratching
my head and saying well, I can do something that would probably give us a three year maintenance
cycle, and that's just not functional when you think of going forty feet in the air in
a cherry picker, and you now have thirty of these.
So the bicycle was really, the sort of, turning point. We discussed the possibility of what
could be done, and I'm telling Brooke about the work I've been doing and the testing and
she said what about replication? What about replicating those most fragile pieces, leaving
those inside the museum which we're creating, and putting replicas of those most fragile
elements on the whirligigs, so they still have the function, that is, they move, they
turn, they engage, they have the aesthetic surface, but we're not putting these most
fragile components in danger and that's, so that's one of the possible scenarios in terms
of the final treatment for these. And you can see by fragility, you get up close,
and you see many of these pieces are, they are pooched, and they are really falling apart.
We're talking about having to almost remake them in order to just stabilize them. If they
were replicated on these most fragile, most damaged surfaces, structures, we could then
keep these, use these for interpretation in the museum, conserve them in the museum to
a museum standard, have them live in the museum and give the people who are visiting the opportunity
to see these up close and personal, but then still go into the park and see the functional
objects. So, again this is that vertical element from
the Simpson, where, yes we saw it had been painted, Vollis never painted it. What did
it look like and underneath, in a small area we found some original paint, which has been
sampled and gone out for paint analysis. So this, in fact, and again, with curatorial
input, the idea was to move these to as functional and as complete as possible.
So, often we have to dance with the devil and DuPont early on, had made an overture
of donating $10,000 in product. I know DuPont's products, and I know DuPont industry. I wanted
to look at a) what we were going to do in terms of what these surfaces should look like,
and this was before Brooke came on board, and b) I want something we can, we know it's
long term stable, that those paints that are intact and not lifting, if we can put an isolating
layer and then put an industrial coating over top of it, we would sample ahead of time,
we would keep copious notes and documentation. And so, the ability then, when products change,
if DuPont, if we can engage DuPont in this as taking it on more seriously, we'd have
that exchange so that if there's a failing product or if there's a product that goes
out of production, they can tell us what would be compatible and functional.
And so, I'm just in the process, when we went down this last time to Wilson, DuPont had
upped to $50,000 in product and I said, "Well, that's great." The local DuPont industrial
supplier came in, we talked, and he was saying, oh you know we can just do this and we walked
him through the project, and I explained to him what the conservation concerns are and
he went, "I see why you want somebody in the home office, I see why you want somebody in
the technical side." I'm making those connections so that we can have this long term marriage
with DuPont, and I know if they commit to the project, their products will be the best,
they'll engage, and they're excited about this, and they can even come down and train
people as to application. And again, I'm reminding them that in terms of surface we don't want
spray coat. We don't want things that look like automobiles. It's going to be hand applied
because that's how Vollis did a lot of the work on these older pieces. The new pieces,
the replicated pieces, if that's the side we go in, would go out, the failing pieces
would be treated as museum objects as part of the exhibition. I think it's a great learning
tool for the public. So the idea, in terms of my overview of conservation,
is maintenance, longevity, health and human safety, respecting the spirit and the aesthetic
essence and the mechanical elements of the whirligigs, but also the spirit and the soul
of Vollis. We're fortunate we still have him, but at some point we won't. Thank you.
Church: We have time for just a question or two if anyone has any.
[Question unintelligible] Jeff [Curie?]: ...road signs we got from [?] North
Carolina about 20 years ago [?]. These are the cotton mill rollers, they're from string mill,
bearings, electroplated nickel silver. He has hundreds of these. He's got like a shipping
container about half full of small electric motors, industrial light covers and this is
one I got from him, I bought that I love so. Great paint on this one, so I love how he
did the eyes but... [Question unintelligible]
Jeff: Yeah, he's hooked the motors up to some, and then he's got one with a generator that
powers some lights, which we didn't realize because we didn't see it, and people had shot
the lights out over the years so... Church: Do we have any questions...we have
time for one or two...yes, Nancy? Nancy: My question is did you say you're only
there two days a year? Jeff: I'm there...[?]
Harvey: Yeah, you've been taking me to dinner over the last several , and I said you need
to propose to me and make this a long term relationship or stop dating. We need more.
What the next move is to go after a grant that's specifically for conservation, so that
we have funding and we don't feel like we're pulling money out of people's pockets. Because
again, remember part of this, the thrust of this project was about employment. At this
point, actually, I'm working at half my daily rate for them. I told them I really love and
I'm challenged by this project and I want to see if through. They 're on board, so yes,
more time. [Question unintelligible]
Jeff: Yeah, we have to, like, there's mechanical work that has to take place. We change out
bearings and fix the mechanicals on them plus some of these pieces are covered by like 2000
reflectors that are cut up road signs. You have to take that off before you can do any
surface treatments anyway. On the pieces that we're going to do the whole system of, so
we have to get reflectors off which takes time. All of the hardware...
[Question unintelligible] Jeff: Yeah, the day to day of all and yeah,
and we collect, we keep the collection and catalog everything that comes off. We put
reflectors on cardboard, label where they come from, how we got them off, we put them
in a section we call the tobacco barn because we hang them all and keep that. We take pictures,
I've got thousands, we took five down the other day, and I've got about 1500 so...
Harvey: And we also have two consultant conservators; Andrew Lins of the Philadelphia Art Museum,
who is probably the best in the United States in terms of coatings and corrosion, and Malcolm
Collum who's head of objects at the Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian. So I like,
and the reason I really wanted to get Malcolm on board is, I think of these whirligigs as
automobiles on sticks and for the public that's an easy way to explain it, because you're
talking about surface coatings and you're talking about mechanics, and then you're talking
about up off the ground, in the air so, Malcolm comes out of functional objects and understands
this dicey walk between museum conservation and functional objects conservation.
Church: Last question. [Question unintelligible]
Harvey: The only outside people are Dennis and I...
Jeff: Yeah, but we've got other local people too. Yeah, Brendan Greaves is at the State
Arts Council and he has a background in art. He is also a folklorist as well, and then
Juan Logan is at UNC Chapel Hill and he's an artist and has worked in metal as well
over the years. You want to talk to that any more...what now?
[Question unintelligible] Jeff: Well, everybody in the shop is doing
mechanical work. We have a workforce of about fifteen folks that some are volunteers, some
are paid full-time, some are paid part-time, we have retirees, we have people who have
been out of work for a long time, we're just at the point now where we're going to get
people in education through the community college system, so they're getting on the
job training as well as going to do some classroom work. We also have some folks who have 35
years of experience, who are just doing this part time, and they're helping to educate
folks in Wilson. So it's kind of a diverse project. We've got a lot of pieces and parts
and it's running five days a week, eight hours a day, actually ten hours a day.
Harvey: I didn't actually say who, sort of why, I was involved. I'm actually with the
National Park Service in the Philadelphia office. I run a monument care program and
so my entire participation has been footed by my office. This is the National Park Service
supporting the effort. So, but I think by, and almost entirely, it's really a local effort.
And a lot of people working on the projects are very much guys like Vollis. I mean, they,
in some cases, the guys in the shop, they think like Vollis, they see mechanical things
like Vollis does, so that's, I think, one of the real strengths of the project as well
to be able to tap into, to people who see things in a very intuitive, see engineering
in a very intuitive way. Church: Alright, thank you. They'll be around
the rest of the conference for more questions...