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Blood & Conservation
Museums, galleries and archives face many challenges around preserving objects and artworks that contain blood. Our journey of blood includes an insight into the methods used to conserve these important items of cultural heritage by a team of experts at the Grimwade Centre for Cultural Material Conservation.
Film - Semiconductor Media, 'Blood and Cultural Conservation', 2017, Science Gallery Melbourne
Film - Semiconductor Media, 'Blood and Cultural Conservation', 2017, Science Gallery Melbourne
I’m Robyn Sloggett, I’m the Gripps Foundations Chair of the Grimwade Centre and I’m also the Director of the Centre
At the centre we have a masters by course work program where we educate, train, teach the next generation of conservators.
We also have a strong PhD research cohort and a number of research programs. And an important part of that is access to the University collections. So we have a number of PhD students working on the collections.
So what’s wonderful about my job is to a large extent the rich nature of the collections that we are involved with.
And The University of Melbourne collections are significant to our work. And I see that in the students when they have access to them.
It just opens up new panoramas. And it’s new ways of thinking about the world. It’s contact with cultures in a very immediate and visceral way because you a looking at the object that someone made.
And you are trying to understand the purpose of that object so that you can decide how you are going to intervene.
What’s an appropriate ethical position to bring to your decision making.
What instruments are you going to use and what processes to unpick the knowledge that’s encapsulated in this object.
And for people at the University and the public who have access to these collections, it’s this extraordinary window into other people’s worlds and for conservators and students in particular I think, that’s a very broad humanistic approach to thinking about an object because what it does is open this window to the complexity of human nature.
We also do a lot of work with Indigenous communities, and remote and regional communities. And as part of that we undertake research, which brings us, and has for all of our existence, into close relationship with Faculty of Science and various department there, such as physics, chemistry, earth Sciences.
A lot of that work involves instrumentation, which we could never afford to purchase but as part of the University’s research programs of course there’s extraordinary equipment that we can access.
But more than that, we also have access to the experts who know how to make those instruments sing.
And that’s really important. So for students analysing work of art that might have blood in it, for example that Rover Thomas might have created using kangaroo blood.
We can go to Earth Sciences to identify the pigments, we can use FTIR in Chemistry to look at the some of the organic materials in that painting.
So it’s a rich interdisciplinary mix and it’s what makes it extraordinary being able to bring together the collections at the University with the expertise right across campus including very much with the Science Faculty.
The other reason that we need access to all of this scientific equipment is for occupational health and safety.
And a significant example is the kinds of stuffed animal specimens such as those in the Tiegs Museum because in the past when they were replacing the bodily fluids and treating the skins in order to create the specimens they used arsenic.
So we need to be able to test these specimens to make sure that the curators, students who access them, our students who might be working on them, are not going to be handling arsenic-laden specimens.
So there’s a range of complexities around accessing the University collections, which are ethical but which are also in many cases occupational health and safety.
One of the things that was fascinating for us to realise was the robust nature of Indigenous art and this was brought home to us in 2011 when we had the Worman flood damaged works in the laboratory and we had staff and students working on that as a major project.
And the works were made with ochre, and many of them with natural binders such as kangaroo blood and resin from the blood-wood tree.
And we expected because they were made from ochre and they got wet that they would be almost reconstituted as mud but we found was that the painted surfaces were very strong and the mud that was lying on top was easily removed.
There’s lots of evidence that blood, because of the oxide, is a very very robust medium. So in the human body we think of it as something that’s ephemeral, and we pass away and our vascular system goes and our blood dissipates but there’s rock art sites in the northern territory and Tasmania that are about 12 thousand years old that have been documented as having human blood as part of the binder and those images are still visible.
So inside our body, blood seems to be one of those fragile part of our nature but outside when it becomes a cultural product used by human beings it takes on this intergenerational robustness that enables it to last thousands and thousands of years and for the cultural product that people have created using blood to continue on to be meaningful for us today.
Reuse this media
Can you reuse this media without permission?No (with exceptions, see below)
Conditions of use
All rights reserved
This media item is licensed under "All rights reserved". You cannot share (i.e. copy, distribute, transmit) or rework (i.e. alter, transform, build upon) this item, or use it for commercial purposes without the permission of the copyright owner. However, an exception can be made if your intended use meets the "fair dealing" criteria. Uses that meet this criteria include research or study; criticism or review; parody or satire; reporting news; enabling a person with a disability to access material; or professional advice by a lawyer, patent attorney, or trademark attorney.
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Please acknowledge the item’s source, creator and title (where known)
Filmed, produced and directed by Andrew Watson (Semiconductor Media) for Creative Victoria and Science Gallery Melbourne. Interview by Alicia Sometimes.
Meet Robyn Sloggett, Director of the Grimwade Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation.
Learn about the diversity of collections and interdisciplinary skills needed to conserve cultural objects and specific challenges of working with items containing preserved blood. From taxidermy to Indigenous art, blood remains a fascinating and robust cultural medium.
Victorian Collections acknowledges the Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
peoples as the first inhabitants of the nation and the traditional custodians of the lands
where we live, learn and work.