April’s News from the Conservation Lab: El Kurru 2018 Season Retrospective | Kelsey Museum

https://kelseymuseum.wordpress.com/2018/04/25/aprils-news-from-the-conservation-lab-el-kurru-2018-season-retrospective/

El Kurru 2018 Season Retrospective | Kelsey Museum

On 04/25/2018 01:45 PM, smullersman wrote:

BY SUZANNE DAVIS, Curator of Conservation

Last month, I returned from fieldwork at El Kurru, the Kelsey's excavation project in Sudan. It was a good season overall, but also a bit odd. It felt to me like a season where almost nothing worked out the way we'd planned. For example, the conservation worklist included stabilization of cracked columns in the funerary temple with a lime-based mortar. I've done work like this on many other projects and expected it to go smoothly, but it didn't. Amaris Sturm — conservation intern this year at El Kurru, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow in conservation at the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation — ended up testing twenty-six (!) different grout mixtures before hitting on one we were happy with. For other team members, equipment was delayed or couldn't get through customs, supplies didn't arrive, and work plans had to be altered mid-season.

In retrospect, it was a season of significant progress on multiple fronts, but at the time … at the time, I often felt like nothing was working and it was seriously frustrating. When I think about it now, my time onsite this year was a small lesson in persistence and a demonstration of the power of kaizen. This philosophy (which originated in the U.S. but became popular in Japan following WWII) advocates continuous improvement by making small changes or taking small steps. In Arabic, people often say, "shwaya-shwaya" to mean, "a little bit," or "little-by-little." For me, it was a shwaya-shwaya season, and in the end we accomplished most of what we'd set out to do.

Amaris Sturm at work in the El Kurru funerary temple. Photo by Suzanne Davis.

 

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