Book & Paper Conservation [MPhil] postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Most customers who bring prints into the framing shop where I work want them back within a week, and most never think about what lies behind the glass. For two years I have cut mounts, fitted backing boards and advised on glazing, and I now notice what the job quietly decides: whether a watercolour sits against conservation board or cheap card, whether it is hinged with gummed tape or a reversible Japanese tissue hinge, whether it hangs in sunlight. When an old framed engraving comes in for refitting, I often find a brown line where a previous mount pressed against the paper, or a tide mark from a damp wall. I want to understand those changes properly, and to train to treat them rather than only avoid causing them.

My degree in History of Art gave me a habit of looking closely at objects as made things. My dissertation examined printed railway timetable posters from the 1870s to the 1890s held by a regional museum, and I was allowed to handle a small selection under supervision. I had planned to write about typography and advertising, but the physical condition of the posters became part of the argument. Some printed on thin, machine-made paper had yellowed and become brittle at the folds, while others survived in far better state. Reading about the move from rag to wood-pulp papers in the nineteenth century helped me see that the cheapness of these posters was built into their materials, and that their survival was partly an accident of storage. Writing it taught me to describe condition carefully and to separate what I could observe from what I was inferring.

Since graduating I have volunteered one evening a fortnight with a local heritage society, rehousing parish records and photographs. The work is basic: removing rusting paperclips and rubber bands, replacing acidic folders, labelling boxes in pencil and keeping a simple location list. I have learned to recognise when something is beyond what a volunteer should touch, such as a flaking photograph or a volume with a detached board, and to set it aside and record it instead. That restraint seems to me as important as any practical skill.

Alongside this I bind books as a hobby, starting from an evening class and continuing at home. I have made pamphlet stitches, Coptic bindings and a few case-bound notebooks, and I keep a notebook of what went wrong and right with each. Working with grain direction, wheat starch paste and different weights of paper has given me a feel for how materials behave, which I expect to be useful when learning how historic bindings were constructed and how they fail. I also enjoy it for its own sake, and some of my evenings are simply spent making things for friends.

The framing job has developed less obvious skills. I measure precisely, cut cleanly, keep a tidy bench and explain options to customers who are worried about a family photograph or a child's drawing. I have learned to say clearly what we can and cannot do, and to write a job sheet that another colleague can follow without asking me.

I recognise that my chemistry is limited to school level, so over the past year I have been working through introductory material on paper chemistry, cellulose degradation and the effects of light and relative humidity, and I am revising basic chemistry so that I can follow scientific teaching with confidence. Postgraduate study in conservation would give me supervised practical training, a rigorous understanding of materials and ethics, and the judgement to decide when intervention is right. I would bring patience, careful hands and an art historian's attention to the object as evidence of how people lived.