Thiruvananthapuram :

In a bid to refurbish and conserve the age-old artefacts at Napier Museum, a group of 20 participants, including 10 students from the National Museum Institute of History of Art, Conservation and Museology in Delhi are taking part in the six-day hands-on workshop conducted at the museum.

As a preliminary step in the preventive conservation, the participants are dry-cleaning the artefacts using soft brushes and vacuum cleaners to remove the dust, dirt and moulds.

“It’s a four-step process which includes cleaning, labelling, measuring and accessing. We are not using solvents or chemicals because the condition of the artefacts is not that worse. We clean them and jot down their condition based on the gravity of damage. The condition of the artefacts is assessed based on the size, stability, fragility and material,” said  Tanushree Gupta, a participant at the workshop and a post-doctorate student at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.

The participants aim at refurbishing around 500 artefacts, including a majority of bronze idols and coins in a span of six days.

The ongoing workshop has also thrown open possibilities for a new storage facility. The refurbished artefacts will be moved to an interim store room for now and will be shifted to a new storage room as soon as the authorities give green signal.

“The strong rooms here do not have the right facilities to store anything. The high level of humidity causes formation of moulds and damages the artefacts severely. There is no ventilation in the strong rooms which causes high humidity and formation of moulds on the surface of the artefacts. We will submit a proposal to the museum authorities to build a new strong room as early as possible,” said Johanna Wilk, one of the participants and a researcher at University of Applied Arts in Vienna.

In 2014, the museum authorities had undertaken a conservation exercise deploying experts to clean stone sculptures, bronze artefacts, wooden exhibits of dirt and dust. It was done as part of Rs 2-crore worth conservation scheme.

source:  http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / News> City News> Thiruvananthapuram News / TNN / February 14th, 2017