Caroline Oliver Conservation

Practical treatment options offered can be tailored to client’s needs but include:

• Condition assessing items to identify treatment required and allow a Treatment Proposal, often with a range of options, to be drawn up.
• Treatments can range from simple conservation framing techniques to ensure the safety of the artwork held within the frame, through cleaning, consolidation, reinstatement of decorative elements, re-gilding and re-integration of repairs.
• All treatments are documented and photographed.

Surveys of collections can be undertaken on site, with the level and range of detail captured tailored to the client’s needs.

• Large scale surveys to identify the most vulnerable items for further assessment.
• More detailed survey reports, giving treatment proposals for individual items.
• Advice of suitability of hanging fittings.
• Advice on collections care.

With over 15 years’ experience of teaching including under- and post-graduate students at university, post-grad interns in the studio and other professionals, I am happy to discuss your training needs. This could cover training staff/volunteers in housekeeping skills and the safe handling of framed items, giving your staff a more in depth understanding of frame styles and materials to enhance visitor experience or designing a bespoke practical course to update conservation professionals in their gilding skills.

This describes the creation of a sealed enclosure within a frame to create a buffered microclimate. This allows paintings to hang in more uncontrolled environmental conditions; the reduced air exchange through the frame lessens the damaging extremes of relative humidity. Using a system developed with testing by preventive conservators, an existing frame can be adapted in a reversable manner, or a vitrine enclosure created.