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One of the many passions of my late mentor Bruno Pouliot was expanding on the knowledge and practice of the stain reduction of ceramics. Working with scientists at Winterthur and WUDPAC, he (and then we) contributed practical research backed by chemical cleaning theory and years of putting research into practice to develop sound protocols for ceramic stain reduction treatments.
Bruno had developed a well-rounded practical seminar on this topic for second-year objects majors, a platform that perfectly enabled experimentation and technique advancement. Soon, colleagues in other institutions began requesting that we hold this seminar for their labs, and so we "took it on the road," so to speak. |
Lead-glazed earthenware (pearlware) sugar bowl with blue underglaze decoration, and staining caused by the breakdown of sugars having entered the body through the crazed lead glaze. WUDPAC study collection
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To date, we have now given this seminar to conservators at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (2012), the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore (2013), the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Lunder Conservation Center in Washington, DC (2014), and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2015). In 2016, Bruno and Richard Wolbers delivered the seminar to the Straus Conservation Center at Harvard University Art Museums in Boston, and in 2020, I will be giving the seminar at its first international venue, in London, as part of the UK's Institute for Conservation (Icon) professional programming.
From left: Meg Craft, Terry Drayman-Weisser, and Bruno Pouliot, at the 2013 seminar, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD
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Lauren lecturing during the 2014 seminar, Lunder Conservation Center, Washington, DC
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Publications
This research is published in the conference proceedings of the ICOM-CC Glass and Ceramic Working Group's 2013 interim meeting in Amsterdam (click to view paper).