2008 Joan Currie - Conservator at Cusworth

In October we met Joan Currie – “Looking at the past for contemporary expression.”  Joan, a member of North Notts. Guild.,  introduced us to her work behind the scenes  as a volunteer in the costume store of Cusworth Hall http://www.cusworth-hall.co.uk/ 

Cusworth Hall was built in the 1740s and is in a parkland setting on the outskirts of Cusworth village in Doncaster, South Yorkshire. The Hall is now the Museum of South Yorkshire Life and its collections depict life in the locality over the last 200 years.

Quoting from a Beryl Bainbridge thriller ‘The Dressmaker’ she gave away her feelings of smoothing the cloth before cutting; Joan was a dressmaker whilst her family were growing up, supplementing her income before returning to teaching. Joan now gives up her day off from the paid job to voluntarily catalogue over 400 hanging garments in the museum collection – in chronological order covering a period of 200 years! Her reward is, of course, the opportunity to view and research these garments; as little as 5% of many museum collections, including this one are ever available to public view at any one time.  Joan works with a conservator, with minimum handling of each fragile garment, researching by looking, Joan will wear 3-4 pairs of white cotton gloves in a day, in order to protect the clothes from her touch. Acid and grease from hands will spoil cloth, particularly silk.

Part of Joan’s project included making 400 padded coat hangers on which to hang the garments!  Joan has a list of 12 questions to cover for every single garment in order to catalogue it – including who/what made it, features of the garment etc.  A risk assessment is carried out before lifting any single garment from the wardrobe – look but don’t touch – until she finally gets to gently look inside the garment for construction methods or even labels to date it.

The pay off for this labour of love is the inspiration it provides her for her works of art. Joan captures the feeling of the garments in words; she might read books of the era, fact or fictional literature relating to the theme or period – an example given was “The Mill on the Floss.”  Some parts of the garments that have inspired her are buttons, Chinese knots on Edwardian dress, rows of bobbles on tea gowns, lacing, “frills and furbelows”.

Joan exhibits her fine art textile pieces with a group in London and showed one piece based on women’s suffrage, votes for woman, the need and capacity to earn money as a woman in the Bronte era etc as inspiration– it became a long narrow piece in silk paper with chains, but also with French knots – a sign of friendship and love in the early part of the 20^th century.  Another piece showed recession and death 1911-1917.

Joan gave us a truly inspiring account of her voluntary role and the reward she receives and I hope it might inspire others to follow her route.