The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
National Trust for Scotland conservator Lyndsay Mackinnon is working behind the scenes to bring out the best of Angus’s rich social history for display at the new home of the region’s folk museum.
The National Trust for Scotland broke ground on the new home of Angus Folk Museum earlier this month as part of its revamp of Montrose’s House of Dun.
Bricks-and-mortar changes are under way in the Dun Estate’s courtyard, which will house the museum’s collection.
A few miles down the road, the objects are being prepared for display. In a warehouse in Brechin, NTS project conservator Lyndsay Mackinnon is working behind the scenes to bring out the best of Angus’s rich social history.
“There’s two types of conservation,” Lyndsay said.
“The first is preventative, which is looking after the environment that the objects are stored in to make sure they don’t come to any harm.
“Then there’s remedial conservation, which is what I’m doing here. It’s more hands-on, doing small repairs to objects to help preserve them.”
In her role at the House of Dun project, Lyndsay is checking over all the objects to make sure they’re suitable for display.
She will then organise their movement and installation.
It sounds simple enough but, with 5,000 objects in the warehouse and just two others to help her, it’s no small feat.
“There’s 5,000 objects and we’re going to be displaying around 1,500 of those,” she says.
The job of whittling down which ones to display fell to a curator and design team.
“They chose stories that they wanted to tell, and they’ve picked out objects to help illustrate these stories.”
But for Lyndsay, a specialist in the conservation of furniture and decorative arts, it’s about zooming in on details rather than the bigger picture.
“One of the best things about being a conservator is that you’re always solving a different problem,” she says.
One of the problems Lyndsay deals with regularly is the logistics of moving fragile or large objects.
Meanwhile, contrary to what some believe, conservation isn’t all about restoring an object to its original form. Lyndsay said there is an art to preserving the story of an object while making it suitable for display. On a practical level, this amounts to a lot of very careful cleaning.