The sorcery of apprenticeship

If you’re passionate about the past and want to learn the skills of conservation then The Heritage Council’s conservation internships might be part of your future.

The programme is aimed at students who have completed specialised conservation courses in the areas of books and paper conservation, conservation science or painting restoration.

It supports the professional development of young conservators by providing them with professional workplace experience in a prestigious institution where professional conservators are already employed on a full-time basis.

These include the Chester Beatty Library, National Gallery including a stint at Dublin City Gallery – the Hugh Lane), National Library and the National Archives.

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It’s a rare opportunity to gain experience in a large institution where technical hand skills can be honed and experience gained within the varied functions – preparing works for display, for loan, for preservation and the conducting of collection surveys.

Internships are offered every year and are for a 12-month duration.

Many of those that have completed the programme have gone on to develop significant careers, in Ireland and abroad.

In 2010 Dr. Élodie Lévêque undertook a conservation internship with the National Library of Ireland.

At the time she already had a degree in bookbinding and a masters in library science. “The Heritage Council internships are very well known in conservation internationally. I saw an advertisement for them and applied,” she says.

“It was great. It’s like a first job in that you are there to work, but without the stress of having to know anything. I was working on projects that needed to be done, with someone to help me if I needed it.”

She spent time working in various areas of conservation, including print and drawings, manuscripts and books.

“I did three months in each, starting with ephemera – posters from the independence of Ireland. It was amazing, I learned so much about Irish history,” says Leveque.

Such work is not about repairing and restoring but conserving and preserving, she explains. The idea is not to make a damaged item look like new again, “but to try and keep some of the history of the damage”, she adds.

With a civil war era handbill, for example, it will remain obvious that this piece of paper was, perhaps, printed quickly, on cheap paper, damaged by weather and retain the holes showing where it was nailed to a lamppost.

“We are not trying to hide damage. We try to stabilise items to make sure they are safe,” explains Leveque, who also worked on Gaelic manuscripts and the Ormond Deeds, a huge collection from Kilkenny spanning the 12th to 18th centuries.

Following the internship she was appointed a senior conservator at both Trinity College Dublin and the National Library. Today Leveque is associate professor in book and paper conservation at the prestigious Sorbonne, in Paris.

A conservation internship helped kickstart Ellen McKeever’s career too. She undertook one at the National Archives in 2015 and today is paper conservator at the National Museum of Ireland.

McKeever always loved history, studying both it, and archaeology at Trinity College Dublin, before working in administration, where she felt “a bit lost”.

A job advertisement in a UK archaeology magazine for a mummy conservator sparked her interest in conservation. “I thought, what’s this? What do I need to do to this this kind of work?” she recalls.

She went back to college, studying for a graduate diploma in conservation at the University of Lincoln and built up her paper skills. The world of conservation is small and friendly but can be difficult to break into, she says. “That’s why the Heritage Council internships are so important.”

In her internship at the National Archives she worked on very early Dáil papers, after which she went freelance, working on a variety of projects. In 2020 she was appointed to her current role in the National Museum, organising exhibitions and preserving its paper-based collections.

“I love working with my hands. People think it must be stressful work but when you know what you are doing, and that you are making a difference, it’s actually very meditative,” she says.

She’s a firm fan of the value of the conservation internship.

“That’s the other thing that’s lovely about it - you get to build your contacts internationally. I now have people all over Europe I can call for advice. To be honest, I don’t think I would be where I am today without the Heritage Council conservation internship.”

To find out more see https://www.heritagecouncil.ie/projects/conservation-internships