New Galway course in treating old furniture

The National Museum has a lot of furniture from old houses in storage in warehouses all around the State. This has indirectly brought about the development of a new course, a three-year national diploma in furniture conservation and restoration which starts this autumn at the Furniture College in Letterfrack, Co Galway. There is a need, says joint course director Finian Sheridan, for people to conserve and restore such old furniture and there is no training in Ireland in this sector.

This year entry to the new course for Leaving Cert students is by points only. Normally there would be assessments as with the furniture design and manufacture course. Four of the 20 places are expected to go to mature applicants, because of the nature of the course. Altogether, there are more than 100 full-time students studying modern furniture design and manufacture at the college.

There are two certificate programmes and an add-on degree programme also operating at the college. The furniture design and manufacture certificate provides students with the skills to design and manufacture high-quality furniture. Furniture production graduates are armed with a knowledge of current manufacturing technologies and innovative approaches to manufacturing quality furniture. The furniture technology degree produces graduates with a developed design and management capacity.

If somebody is interested in furniture, why would they choose this new course over any of the existing courses on offer? For starters, says Sheridan, the students will be working with wood and become trained cabinetmakers, with an emphasis on traditional techniques. "They would have to have an interest in the history of furniture, in conservation, because they won't have the scope to develop their own ideas. They are working within stricter guidelines, in some ways," says Sheridan.

Students would have to be interested in that as opposed to modern designs. Whatever course a student decides upon, they will be able to make furniture. But with the new course there is not the opportunity for students to explore their own designs and creativity.

The six subject areas covered throughout the three years are traditional processes, furniture materials, restoration science, communication skills, furniture history and the restoration business. Facilities at the college, which is run in partnership with Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology and Connemara West, a rural development company, include large workrooms, machine halls, drawing studios, a computer suite, seminar rooms, a library and laboratories.

There is a big distinction made between conservation and restoration at Letterfrack. "The conservator's primary aim would be to keep the integrity of the piece intact and would make it obvious, though perhaps not to the public, but certainly to the trained eye, that work has been done on the piece."

A trained conservator should be able to disguise their work in such a way that people should not be able to distinguish whether it was a genuine article or a copy, says Sheridan. "It might not look as nice or pleasing to the eye but it would be of greater value the fact that it was conserved as opposed to being restored," he explains. The emphasis in Letterfrack is that conservation is the more important of the two.

There are more jobs than students for all the courses, according to Sheridan. Some 90 per cent of former graduates are employed, 68 per cent are directly employed in furniture or wood-related industries and 15 per cent have established their own furniture workshops in Ireland. Three years down the line when the furniture conservation and restoration course its first graduates, Sheridan expects there will be work for them. "There will be work for them, not just as conservators or restorers, but they could also be involved in the commercial side of it and the business side of it," he says.

The Government is pouring more money into this sector, with a number of furniture exhibitions in various museums, Sheridan says. The whole area hasn't had enough expertise so far, he says. This course will change that.