Textile Conservation : Advances in Practice

This second edition of Textile Conservation offers an up-to-date perspective on the role and practice of textile conservators, capturing the diversity of textile conservation work across the globe.

The volume considers key factors that are integral to effective conservation decision-making. It achieves this by focusing on four major factors that have influenced development in textile conservation practice over the past decades: the changing context, an evolution in the way conservators think about objects, the greater involvement of stakeholders, and technical development. Features of the new edition include:

• Updated chapters that explain new techniques and recent developments in the field;
• New and updated international case studies that demonstrate conservation decision-making in practice, including assessments of the conservation of objects in some of the world’s major cultural institutions;
• Full-colour illustrations that demonstrate conservation in practice.

Textile Conservation will be essential reading for conservators around the world. It will also be of great interest to academics and students engaged in the study of the conservation of textiles, as well as museum and heritage professionals.

Frances Lennard worked as a textile conservator for 15 years, at the Textile Conservation Centre and in private practice with Fiona Hutton, before moving to the academic sphere and becoming the convenor of the postgraduate textile conservation programme at the University of Southampton and later at the University of Glasgow. Her research focused on conservation treatment and interdisciplinary practice; she is particularly interested in the treatment of woven tapestry, painted textiles and Pacific barkcloth. She became an Honorary Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow in 2021.

Patricia Ewer, the principal of Textile Objects Conservation, LLC, has over 35 years of international experience in treating textiles, as well as managing, developing and staffing conservation projects of all disciplines. She is a Fellow of the American Institute for Conservation, the organization she has been a member of since 1989. She is co-editor with Frances Lennard of the 2010 text Textile Conservation: Advances in Practice.

Laura Mina serves as Conservator of Textiles with the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture. Previous institutions include a joint appointment with Winterthur Museum and the University of Delaware, the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She received her BS in Performance Studies from Northwestern University and her MA in Fashion and Textile Studies: History, Theory, Museum Practice (conservation focus) from the Fashion Institute of Technology. She has led multiple workshops on the use of gels for textile treatments.