Chinese Export Porcelain Plate

This proved to be one of the most challenging projects I had to work with in my whole two years in the program. I had worked with this object from the beginning of first year in 2016 and finished it just before i left for my summer internship in 2018. This archaeological item was excavated by Ontario Heritage Trust at the site of Hudson's Bay Staff house located on Factory Island in the Hudson Bay. This is a porcelain object dating from the 18th century. The main areas of concern for this object were further fragmentation due to improper storage and dissociation. The treatment done to combat these issues were as follows:

• Mechanical surface cleaning with scalpel and water to reduce surface accretions
• Immersion bath with distilled water at 24 degrees Celsius to see if water affects the piece for an anionic wash cleaning of all the pieces.
• Anionic wash cleaning of the fragments with Synperonic™ A-7 in a 1:20 solution
• Solvent surface cleaning with acetone to reduce excess adhesive and accession numbers which could not be removed through a detergent washing.
• Test for iron directly on the fragment to confirm the presence of iron staining.
• Acetone chamber to take down previous join with 10mL of acetone.
• Syringe acetone into the join to attempt to break down join between fragments G and H.
• Acetone poultice used to successfully take down previous join between fragments G and H
• Consolidation of break edges using ~10% Paraloid B-72 w/v in acetone.
• Reassemble fragments using ~50% Paraloid B-72 w/v in acetone.
• Two separate plaster fills with a dental wax mold done at the base and rim.
• Filling in gaps between the casting plaster with Flügger.
• Dry and wet sanding of the filling material to create a level surface flush against the object.
• Consolidation of plaster fill with ~10% Paraloid B-72 w/v in acetone.
• In-painting of the plaster fill with golden acrylic paints dilute with golden gloss medium, water, and acrysol WS 40

The most challenging part was to get the fill with a virtually floating piece in the middle of the fill. There was also the issue of the two larger fragments only joined together at one small area which made creating a fill all the more difficult as this join would often fail during sanding process. The fill was done about 7 times before the final product was created. The second challenge was the in painting. I had struggled for a long time to get the subtle grey-blue base colour of the plate. I also had difficulty matching the blue wash colour of the decoration. The total hours for this object was about 60 hours.