Folding, stitching, turning: putting conservation into perspective

Abstract

The Victoria & Albert Museum marked a turning point in museum policy in Britain in conceiving the modern museum as an instrument of modern education. Through its cultural programme based on education and the relationship between objects and people, the V&A was established as an applied and decorative arts museum. As a source of object-specific knowledge, it has constructed a comprehensive canon around applied arts and their makers, shaped almost exclusively in its own context. In museum practice, conservation is part of the construction and transmission of knowledge through a distinctive relationship to objects and choices made in the studio, guided by a set of ethical values and a hands-on approach. This article follows the conservation of an 18th-century mantua (a 17th–18th-century court dress) for display in the V&A galleries and offers an insight into a process of continuous conflict between the uncovering and reconstruction of truth that takes place in the conservation studio, and the relationship to the object’s biography in tracing its original form. The author also examines the preservation of cultural material as a way of materializing the self and contextualizing social activity.