The AICCM Bulletin, Volume 37.2 Editorial

The papers in volume . are drawn from the presentations at the  AICCM National Conference ‘Illuminating the new: contemporary practice and issues in materials conservation’ in Hobart, Tasmania. The conference theme aimed to recognise ‘the challenges facing conservators’ (McDonald ) and reiterated that the things we preserve ‘is a statement of what we respect, who we are and who we wish to be’ (Jones & Holden cited in Williams , p. ). In addressing these challenges, papers range from material and practicebased case studies, reflexivity and positive strategies to move beyond the issues. Case studies make up the majority of papers here and represent the real world examples from where detailed analysis, scoping and a questioning of what we do, can be reported. The practical case study raised in Sarah Babister and Danielle Measday’s paper on ‘Assessing taxidermy on display: contexts, tools and challenges for natural sciences conservation,’ illustrates the unique problembased and cross disciplinary activities known to the conservation profession. Using low cost digital tools that have been tried and tested in the real world, the paper reports on the benefits and new application of GoPro Video cameras to conservation documentation. Their use illustrates a dynamic form of documentation with a future in real time access to information and digital reporting to compliment the strong hold of written condition reports. Similar to the intent of Museum Victoria’s ‘Wild’ exhibit, the GroPro cameras could one day offer increased visual access and visitor interaction, being a focal point for museums today. In doing so, while the exhibition aims to illustrate ‘the fragile state of our biodiversity, environment and climate’ (Babister & Measday ), the use of the GroPro cameras also highlights the risks and fragility of what remains, that being the taxidermy collections. The paper demonstrates the current use of the action cameras to document and visually communicate the risks to the taxidermy collection but also realises the shortcomings of the fixed aperture and large depth of field. This means that close up inspection is limited and highlights that off the shelf technologies are not always applicable to conservation’s unique needs and often requires modifications. Likewise, the scope and unique challenges in cultural materials conservation are reported in two papers by Cash Brown and Gómez Lobón’s ‘Study and Documentation of the Materials and Techniques of Tasmanian Artist Philip Wolfhagen and the implications of the use of beeswax medium in his paintings’, and Sabine Cotte, Nicole Tse and Alison Inglis’ ‘Artists’ interviews and their use in conservation; reflections on issues and practices’. Acknowledging that cultural materials conservation is interdisciplinary and a culmination of technically driven solutions, experiential knowledge and documentary research, both papers show that oral history accounts provide an additional source of knowledge when it is obtained, analysed and disseminated appropriately. Being particularly useful for the conservation of contemporary art, Brown’s paper posits the use of artist’s interviews to investigate a degradation problem relating to the artist’s work. Together with the reading of materials and knowledge of their material properties, the author’s document the artist’s choice and use of materials over an extended time frame and discuss why this mechanism is occurring. This is a useful documentary source of Philip Wolfhagen’s oeuvre in itself. While Cotte’s paper advocates for artist’s interviews as pivotal in extrapolating the meanings of materials and processes in Mirka Mora’s works of art. The paper provides a more expanded guideline for the practice and analysis of oral histories, ways of acknowledging bias and the unique material perspective conservation contributes. The paper argues that this has not been fully addressed in the conservation literature. New technical solutions and advanced analytical techniques are demonstrated in the papers by Sophie Theobald Clark and Gillian Osmond’s ‘The Materials and Techniques of William Robinson’, Ian MacLeod and Rinske Carr’s ‘Conservation of a mid-th century pretiosa mitre from New Norcia’, and Robin Tait and Mar Gómez Lobón’s ‘The conservation treatment and visual reintegration of a major repair of a painted portrait photograph of the Reverend William Henry Browne.’ They illustrate the complexities of conservation research and treatments, and the need to tailor and devise new solutions for each set of circumstances. They combine cross disciplinary skills and experiential knowledge to develop distinct solutions to either analyse or treat works of art, and also profile conservation in the various contexts of private practice, externally funded projects to an institutional framework. Across these papers it is worth considering what tasks conservators are being asked to perform, what is reported and in what ways do they meet the challenges of ‘contemporary practice and issues in materials conservation?,’ being the theme of the Hobart Conference. Robyn Sloggett’s paper on ‘Relinquishing ambu-