Welcome Victoria Thomas, Assistant Lecturer in Textile Conservation

In 2024 we were delighted to welcome Victoria Thomas, newly appointed Assistant Lecturer in Textile Conservation. With a background in technical design and contemporary garment manufacturing, she brings a wealth of expertise to the field. She holds a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) and a Master’s in Cultural Materials Conservation, specializing in the preservation of contemporary costume, historically significant textiles, and modern art. Victoria Thomas reflects on her practice below in this interview by current PhD candidate Seka Seneviratne.

Could you tell us a bit about what drew you to become a conservator?

What drew me in and what keeps me motivated and engaged in practice is that conservation is a space for enacting care, and it offers a tactile engagement with cultural material. These are pretty broad and slightly abstract things to look for in a profession, but they are the foundational things for me.

I’m very drawn to tangible, tactile applications for value-based theories of care for culture: conservation for me is an outcome of these theories. When I started, I knew I wanted to work in the arts and culture sector, and conservation offered a pathway to do so that is also compatible with my values for the preservation of culturally and historically significant material and the opportunity to do so in a tangible way.

Could you share some insights into your educational journey? What degrees or programs did you pursue, and were there any pivotal experiences, projects, or mentors during your studies that guided you toward a career in conservation?

I completed a Bachelor of Arts with a broad humanities focus: anthropology, art history and literature. at the same time, I had finished high school with vocational training in pattern making and garment fabrication. I enjoyed the tactile and productive nature of that work but found my values didn’t align with jobs where those skills are primarily used, like fashion and garment production.

While I was also drawn to the humanities and the opportunities in that space to engage critically with cultural products and practices, largely through the production of and interrogation of theory, this also was lacking for me tangible outcomes and opportunities to work with my hands. Conservation sits in between for me: it provides an opportunity to engage critically with understandings of significance and value and apply that understanding often in tangible action (through conservation methods of assessment, analysis and treatment).

I’ve found mentors within the professional community who have not only taught me their approach to processes within textile conservation but have also been encouraging of me to develop my own, and to incorporate my skills from related training and experience.

What types of objects do you typically work with in your conservation practice? Are there particular materials or challenges that you find especially compelling in your day-to-day work?

I work on a pretty broad range of textiles. There’s variety in terms of format: three-dimensional objects like garments, upholstered furniture, and sometimes contemporary sculpture. Then there are two-dimensional textiles like tapestries, weavings and embroideries. I don’t tend to distinguish them as separate categories for practice, though, particularly with garments, there’s a level of dynamism in the object that I have to recognize when making treatment decisions and recommendations for use.

One of the most compelling types of conservation treatments for me is stain reduction. Stains present such fascinating loci for understanding the value, history and materiality of a textile. They’re interesting as evidence of the textile fibre’s interactions with the world.

While stains will almost always be ‘non-original’, they’re not necessarily always undesirable. Sometimes the stain itself makes the garment significant as evidence of use (particularly with garments), which can mean we want to preserve it.

Where reduction is wanted, in cases that it is visually disturbing or presents a risk of degradation of the fibres, the stains also present a stimulating opportunity for applied chemistry and working through methods of cleaning that are safe for the fibre. I tend to like to work with tailored aqueous solutions, which involves modifying the properties of water to target stains.

Do you have a favourite object or collection that you have worked on? What made it particularly memorable or meaningful for you?

So, particularly memorable were the Kasperle puppets from the Tatura Irrigation and Wartime Camps Museum, which I worked on while at Grimwade Conservation Services and which was funded by Heritage Victoria’s Living Heritage Grant program. These are composite objects, mostly papier-maché and plaster with textile costumes, mostly made from ‘found’ materials.

Puppets can be such interesting objects in this way as iterations of an existing type – in this case, the Kasperle stock characters – made material with what is available in a particular place and time: in this case, the prisoner of war camps at Tatura following World War II.

As a conservation project, there was a lot of work in identifying what was degradation as a result of long term storage, and what was evidence of use or manufacture (which had a home-made, non-professional quality) that informed the significance of these items. It was also memorable given that some of the work was undertaken while working from home during lockdown, for which we received special permission.

What subjects you are planning to teach next year?

I will be teaching the treatment-focused subjects Conservation Practice (CUMC90030) and Advanced Conservation Practice (CUMC90005), focusing on conservation textiles and organic objects.

In what ways do you hope to incorporate the practical knowledge and hands-on expertise gained from your conservation work into your teaching at the University of Melbourne?

Conservation actions and decision making can be informed by a lot of context you’re not always conscious of, so whatever practical examples I can provide from my practice, I think will be valuable.

I’m also very interested in the concept of embodied knowledge – the part of conservation practice that we learn through continual tactile engagement with materials and their response to our interventions – and how to translate that, or at least guide students towards building their own.

Feature image: Victoria Thomas working on costume from the Art Gallery of South Australia (photo: Saul Steed)