Conserving the Past. Behind the scenes of The Gallery of Medieval Life: A British Museum Partnership

These objects are going into the Gallery of Medieval Life, which is a British Museum and Norwich partnership gallery. We're talking around 900 objects and around 60 from the British Museum. This is a recent acquisition, a metal detector find. At the moment I'm just cleaning some of the soil off it and revealing some rather lovely gilt surface. It looks to be a 12th, 13th century little mount made of copper alloy, possibly the Virgin Mary. My responsibility is the objects that are going on display in the new gallery. Some of them will need repair, cleaning, even reconstruction, and I'll be ensuring that they're stable and accessible and that visually they're understandable. I am currently conserving this funeral pool. It dates from about the early 1500s. It's silk velvet woven with gold thread. In the late 2000s we undid the frame to assess the condition and discovered that it was enormous. We realised that we've got a rare pre-Reformation funeral pool. A few years later, come the Keep redevelopment, this was high on the list for inclusion in the new gallery. The other objects I've got in the lab are rather wonderful. Three figures from a medieval altarpiece, probably originated in Germany or Austria. We're still doing quite a lot of detective work to find out more about it. They're in very poor condition and they've been heavily overpainted. Some of them have got up to 12 layers of overpaint on them. One of the tasks we've had is to remove that overpainting and reveal the medieval paint underneath, which has been a long and complex task. It's involved decision-making, ethical considerations, talking with other specialists, and then the task itself and various trials to find the best way of doing that. Working on this pool, I estimate it will take me about 650 hours in total to work on it. So far, I've surface-cleaned it, but in order to access the damage, I've had to separate the two layers. To support it, I've picked this gold-coloured silk and then I'm working my stitch repairs through to this layer. In the short term, when I've finished conserving it and I've put the two pieces back together, it will go into store because this is one of five pieces that we will have in the new gallery. When its time comes, it will have a bespoke mount made and we're hoping that will help it to look as it would have been used originally. Our aim isn't to make things look new or fully repaired, it's to keep them looking as authentic as possible without interfering with them too much. Conservation really is access. It's the way you can safely see objects without them deteriorating. It's also important because if we're looking at objects that are 1,000 years old, the aim is for somebody in 1,000 years time to also be able to look at those objects.