Julia Landry on the Challenges and Rewards of Historic Paper Conservation

Books and paper have fascinated me for as long as I can remember. It is a source of satisfaction to be able to marry one's passion and one's vocation together to any degree.

                                                                              ~Julia Landry, The Paper Lady

Things fall apart, but if they are made of paper Julia Landry can probably fix them. 

On February 24, paper conservator Julia Landry gave a talk to a healthy crowd of NSBAG members and friends about her work on a unique restoration project at Government House that she has been involved in for the past twenty years.

The Morning Room at Government House had a problem with its wallpaper.  Installed in the 1930s, the wallpaper is a tin-foiled, handpainted mural of botanicals and birds that meander along and up the walls of this jewel of a room in the residence of Nova Scotia's Lieutenant-Governor.  Known as "tea papers", the wallpaper is made from hand-pieced rectangles of paper, transported from China in tea chests, that were glued together into panels for applying to plaster walls.  In 2004, Julia was called to Government House to assess damage to the wallpaper resulting from a leaky pipe behind the plaster wall.  And so began the twenty-year dance with the wallpaper, the walls and the various challenges to seamlessly restore their integrity.

In her talk, "Still Vertically Challenged", Julia described the diverse ways that recurring damage to the wallpaper has been painstakingly repaired over the years.  From water leaks to black mold, missing panels and "mystery goo" (the technical term), Julia and her colleague, fine art conservator Michelle Gallinger, have managed to analyse problems and devise solutions for their careful restoration.  Noting that the job is "one of those things that looks worse until it gets better", Julia and Michelle have worked to make invisible their repairs to delaminated wallpaper panels, fissures caused by cracked plaster, and damage from mold and a few decades of ill-advised cleaning products.  Describing the labour as a "huge, vertical jigsaw puzzle", the team have employed many solutions, including careful handcleaning, studied inpainting, foil application and plaster repair and all on the vertical plain, a particular challenge to the necessity to apply weight to the repairs while they stabilize.

Julia's in-depth slide show demonstrated, however, that the team's handiwork has been worth it.  The Morning Room is one of the grandest rooms in Government House; it is where the government of Nova Scotia is formed, it is where dignitaries and guests are received and it is a space that exhibits the history, grace and hospitality of our province.  And, thanks to Julia and Michelle, it does so, without peeling wallpaper.