Conservation-restoration & Preventive Conservation
Anaïs Gailhbaud is a conservator specialized in sculptures and a consultant in preventive conservation.
She is a graduate of the Ecole du Louvre and the Institut National du Patrimoine, specializing in sculpture. As such, she is authorized to work for museums bearing the “Musées de France” label. She also holds a Master 2 in Preventive Conservation of Heritage from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne.
She has been working independently since 2007 for museums, research centers in France and abroad, historical monuments, local authorities and collectors.
Activities
Preserve
All cultural object requires special attention and appropriate care in order to prolong its life and ensure its material transmission.
Conserving cultural heritage implies identifying the causes of its damages (diagnosis) by mobilizing knowledge about the heritage materials and their deterioration processes.
Bad environmental conditions, insects, microorganisms but also human interventions cause damages that can evolve.
We eliminate the causes of these alterations by acting on the work or its environment, then we stabilize the objects using proven techniques.
Restore
Restoring works of art allows us to improve their legibility or to re-establish a given historical state. These interventions are carried out in consultation with the person in charge of the property in order to define together the objectives of the treatments.
Our choices are based on the historical and technical expertise of the work which calls upon the knowledge of art historians, scientists and the curator-restorers.
These treatments are based on the principles of the ECCO: they are stable, reversible, legible and compatible with the original material, preserved in its entirety.
Anticipate
Preserving heritage requires anticipating the risks to which the collections will be subjected.
We propose diagnoses in order to define, with you, conservation objectives and to elaborate a global or targeted strategy to reach them.
We can assist you in the management of your collections, the monitoring of the condition of the collections, the environment, the implementation of conservation-restoration programs and your storage and exhibition projects.
Our knowledge of the nature of collections, their uses and their deterioration allows us to assist collection managers and architects in the design of optimized environments for the storage and display of works.
Finally, we can set up multidisciplinary teams for preliminary studies, audits, collection work sites, and global conservation-restoration programs.
Document
Each of our interventions on a work of art gives rise to a report which describes its techniques of realization (materials, traces of tools, the stratigraphy of the surface treatments…) and its state before treatment (report of state and diagnosis).
This report documents the work in its materiality. It also describes the treatments carried out and justifies the restoration choices. Finally, this report communicates recommendations (climate, light, handling, packaging…) useful for its conservation.
It constitutes documentation that contributes to the understanding of cultural goods and will facilitate, in the future, the intervention of other conservation professionals.