Our Ladies: the Conservation Interview

Discovering the Issue of Conserving Plastics

I just took a three day workshop on how to be better at interviewing artists, held by the not-for-profit, Voices in Contemporary Art, which was fascinating and useful. There were only two artists in the whole group. The majority of participants were conservators and curators. As a side effect of taking this workshop, I learned that plastics conservator is a job – it’s just one of those things I never thought about.

And, guess which body of work of mine uses lots of plastic? The Our Ladies of Perpetual Housework. I never thought about any long term issues about the plastic items in these works.  And, I’m still not entirely sure what issues I should be concerned about.  I think these plastics are relatively stable ones.

Conservation interviews are where a conservator would get to ask a living artist questions about materials and processes that they used, so that the conservator can make appropriate choices about preventative conservation, storage, etc.

Since the Our Ladies are in my collection, that makes me the conservator, curator and the artist. But who knows, in the future, will someone else need to know about these pieces, how they were made, out of what, and what my intentions were?

Let’s interview me!

Let’s do a conservation interview about these artworks.

What are the Our Ladies made out of?

Each shrine in the series is a shrine to a goddess (or a patron saint) of a specific kind of task – Dinner, Housework, Driving, Laundry, Dishes, Beauty, Frugality, Coffee, Homework. Each one is an assemblage sculpture with a silver-leafed saint (with a couple of exceptions). The first two in the series were Our Lady of Perpetual Dishes and OLoP Laundry. Laundry is made on an upside-down bucket of laundry detergent, the actual kind I used at the time, a big 4 gallon bucket from Costco.  The others have as their bases, variously, a coffee carafe, a cigar box, a small camping cooking pot, a wood panel, a decorative wooden spool, a plastic cake plate and mirror, and a sleeve ironing board.

Those first two sculptures, Dishes and Laundry, each also contain a doll bathtub, which is also silver-leafed. For the silver-leafing, I used real silver leaf and traditional sizing and sealer.

The doll bathtubs are not 1:6 (or fashion doll scale) and they’re not 1:12 (dollhouse scale) they’re sort of an in-between size, for some kind of children’s toy. The doll bathtubs were acquired secondhand. The saint figures were purchased from a novelty company that sold various figures, such as the Patron Saint of TV (St. Clare), Waitresses (St. Martha), Lost things (St. Anthony), etc. The product line is now discontinued.  They were based on real saints, but sold for their humorous value, not intended for actual religious use. I thought it would be offensive to purchase saint figures from a religious supply store, so I didn’t.

Does it matter which saint goes with which shrine? (For example, if there were damage or loss and a saint figure had to be replaced.) For the most part, it doesn’t really matter, but I did place St. Martha, who is holding the ladle, in the Our Lady of Perpetual Dinner shrine.

These are assemblage sculptures, so in general, I collected/gathered/acquired the items, sometimes altered them, and them assembled them into a new thing.  Most of the miniatures in these pieces are dollhouse miniatures, so a 1:12 scale.  Housework contains PlayMobil items as well as dollhouse items.  Scales are sometimes combined, in a sort of folk art way, perhaps.  Laundry includes a clothes line that goes around the back of the piece and has handmade doll clothes hanging on the line, those clothes are maybe fashion doll sized.  It also includes doll clothes at another scale, and doll towels and blankets.  It has model railroad Astro-turf/faux grass on the top of the bucket, as this is an outdoor scene.  All of the clothes, blankets and towels are handmade, though not by me.

Which things matter?  If a museum had to recreate any of these elements, which aspects would matter?

This is an interesting question, and one I never really thought about before this training.  Since I’m very much alive and why would I think about someone else having to remake one of my artworks?  I take pride in constructing my pieces well.  My training was first as a metalsmith, and I care about quality of construction and craft.  I learned to silver-leaf at Arrowmont School of Craft.

Most of the items are found/purchased.  Some of them were vintage-ish at the time I purchased them and, since they were an assortment of plastic toys in a gallon Ziplock bag from a rummage sale or thrift store, I don’t know what brand they were or what doll they went with.  Other times I know, like the PlayMobil items in Housework, or the car being Little People in Driving.

It does matter that the clothing and textiles in Laundry are handmade, even though I didn’t make them.  Those would be hard to replicate or buy, if they had to be replaced.  The clothesline is just regular kitchen twine.

Do any of these works need conservation now?

Yes, Our Lady of Perpetual Dishes is supposed to have a little white Dove at the top.  You can see it in photo of the work in the case at the West Englewood Library, the dove is there, but in the present day photo, it’s gone.  That dove just does not like to stay on.  I need to reattach it in a different way.  I like that detail, of the dove.  It’s from a plastic wedding favor item.

A child visitor once broke the bathtub off of Laundry, and I repaired it.  Housework was damaged in shipping, because of less than ideal packing and shipping by a gallery.  I also repaired that, and also decided to never ship these works again.  (Or if I did, they would have custom foam, custom crates, and be double boxed, with a foam layer between.)

Is everything silver or metallic in these pieces silver-leafed?

No, the Little People VW Bug is painted with metallic paint, the very stinky kind used by builders of model cars and planes. Testors brand paint. Why? Have you ever tried to silver-leaf plastic? It’s really rather a pain, it takes multiple passes. The car is just so big, compared to the saint figures, I didn’t want to silver-leaf it, so I painted it.

The fashion doll head/bust in “Our Lady of Perpetual Beauty,” is silver-leafed, and she looks super creepy, and is not my favorite in the series because of that. Her hair is not silver-leafed. I think I painted it with Testors.

The surround behind the saint in OLoP Housework (the two level one, built on a sleeve ironing board) is the lid of a large sardine tin.

What kind of glue did you use?

In general, one of my favorite glues is Devcon 5-minute, two-part epoxy. It works well on bonding plastic to plastic. If it’s a clear-dry glue, there’s a good chance it was epoxy. When gluing wood to wood, today I would use wood glue. For gluing the pencils to the cigar box in OLoP Homework, I would hope that I used wood glue. But it could have been epoxy, or even Alene’s Tacky glue, which is pretty strong stuff. I don’t remember.

I never use Super Glue.

And here are some questions a curator might ask.

You’ve written elsewhere that the artworks in this series are a cry for help, and a complaint. Tell us more about that.

Yes, I said that at the time. Really, they were mostly a complaint, but no one likes a complainer, so I added that they were a cry for help. The other thing that people misunderstand, and that my husband worries about, is that people think my husband and family must be awful, and not contribute to the household at all. That’s not true and also not what these pieces are about. Dishes and laundry are the worst, they never end. And when I made those first two piece, I had young children and my husband had a very, very long commute.  Everyone hates the never ending housework, these works are about that universal experience, not my specific family.  And more generally, these pieces are about the drudgery that comes along with motherhood in America.

I made the first one or two and friends insisted, demanded that I make more. I was resistant at first but gave in. I asked them what they wanted me to make and they said dinner, homework, driving. Homework wasn’t an issue for me as a mom, but I had been a student, so I could do that one. That one was really fun, sourcing the parts for it. Those are authentically chewed and sharpened pencils. I would ask for things on various give-stuff-away platforms. I asked for used pencils and got Ziplock bags full from two different families.

For driving, I wanted a mini van but couldn’t find one.  Assemblage art is about collecting, just in case, and about going on the hunt for the specific things you need.

Why did you choose the form of the shrine for this series?

The form for these were inspired by two things. Seeing small grottos in the mountains where I grew up. And by a folk art book from the library, that showed a front yard shrine of the Virgin Mary, with her surround behind her being an actual, full size bathtub, buried, standing up, in the dirt. It was buried about 1/4 to 1/3 into the ground. I don’t remember the name of the book, I went back to the library but never found it again. It was a large photo book with a title like Folk Art from Around the World. That’s a book that I saw as an adult, around the time before I made these pieces.

In addition, I like to use materials and forms that help people understand my message. People get these works immediately, and often laugh. Catholics perhaps appreciate them even more than others. At the Zoom Conference* for metalsmiths, at a college in Bloomington, IN, in the late 2000s, a professor I took a workshop with said this about form : he works almost exclusively with the form of trophies and he said that he uses the form as idiom. Well, I didn’t go to art school, so I don’t 100% know what that means, but that’s what I’m doing. I’m using the form of shrines as a shortcut to understanding for the viewer. The saint figures need a setting, they need all their symbols that tell you what they’re about. That each figure is more or less in a shrine, with, mostly, a surround behind them, makes the series cohesive.

(*Re the Zoom conference, this had nothing to do with the online meeting software, which it pre-dates.  I have the name of the professor written down somewhere…)

Do you show these works in galleries?

Do I show them? Yes. In galleries, no. People love these works. Libraries love them. They’ve been shown at the West Englewood Public Library (part of the Chicago Public Library system) and the Orland Park Public Library in Orland Park, Illinois, and in the Oak Park Public Library, Maze Branch.

Perhaps because they use toys? Or the subject matter? These have never been shown in any galleries and I gave up trying to get them shown there. I’m keeping the series together, for a future retrospective of my work. And they don’t take up too much space – they live on top of the shelves in my studio.

Here’s OLoP Dishes, shown with a not-serious piece with a dinosaur, and a ribbon I awarded myself.

Oh wait, correction, Our Lady of Perpetual Housework was in a gallery show in Florida.  It was a show where you paired your artwork with a song.  Here’s a link to a blog post about that show, and the song I chose.

Are there any misconceptions that people have about these pieces?

I think that sometimes people think that I am Catholic, when I am not. But I live in Chicagoland, which is a very Catholic area. People often assume that I steal my children’s toys for these works. I do not. I buy my own, at the dollar dtore, at thrift stores. I never, ever, ever used my children’s toys. In fact, it worked the other way more often, I would buy toys for art, and one of my kids might say, “um, could I have that?” And of course I’d give it to them. Eventually they might say, okay, I’m done, you can have it back. That happened at least twice that I can remember. Once was with the big pink dollhouse that later became the Angelica Kauffman Dollhouse Art Center.

You said above that with some exceptions, each of these works includes a saint figure, can you tell us about one of the works that does not?

This one, Our Lady of Perpetual Frugality, does not contain a figure. But I see it as part of the series. It’s about letting go of ideas that are no longer serving you, in this case, about not needing to be quite so penny-pinching any more. The little jar is full of actual pennies, they’re just sitting in the jar, no glue. The house form is covered with coupons.

This one has a silver-leafed figure, but it’s a graduate figure, not a saint. It was inspired by my niece, who was in college at the time, and drinking a lot of coffee. The coffee beans are real coffee beans, spray painted gold. (Whew, talk about a conservation issue.)  I would like the coffee beans to be even shinier.  I might re-do those at some point.  I bought cheap beans, very dry.  And spray painted them gold with a very metallic, shiny spray paint.  I later discussed it with an artist friend who said I should have painted them white first, and then gold.  If I re-do them at some point, that’s what I would do.

Let’s Get Even More Meta

What have you learned, from this conservation interview and examination of your series, Our Ladies of Perpetual Housework?

Well, this is all making me think about the importance of really detailed materials lists.  That’s one of the things I always want to know more about when I’m in galleries and museums.  HOW was it made?  WHAT is it made of?  And process notes, how it was made, with even more detailed notes about types of glue and paint.  I’m not sure where those process notes go?  If I had an online archive software program (I did, they closed down sadly, and the others are all too expensive), I’d note it there.

In the workshop this week, we heard from two curators who are working with an artist’s estate and trying to find out, and honor his intentions.  That’s made me realize the importance, even more, of documentation, especially of installation work.  Luckily I write a lot, here on the blog, and have been interviewed in print, so there’s not a shortage of writing by and about me.  I do take a lot of photos, but are they aways labeled, and available somewhere besides my computer?  Not so much.

The curators only have one minute of video of their artists.  One minute!  And it’s so precious to them.  That made me realize I really need to get over myself, put on my make-up, and be on screen more often.