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I am the senior conservator at the Chester Beatty here in Dublin, in Dublin Castle, and that means that I am taking care of the preservation and conservation of art objects within our collection. This is mainly manuscript-based, and I specialize in the conservation of manuscripts in a bound form, so the book as it’s been produced over many centuries. My personal area of interest and research is Islamic manuscripts, so I am particularly interested in any manuscripts that were made from the eastern Mediterranean and further east. I find them really fascinating.
I’m very fortunate in that I realized what I wanted to do when I was quite young, so when I was at school and I was talking to careers advisers, I heard about this fascinating subject called conservation, and I realized that was what I wanted to do. In school I liked arts and sciences, so I wanted to find a way of using both of them, and conservation became the obvious route to do so. I studied conservation as an undergraduate course at Camberwell College of Art in London, and that was a three-year degree course. It was focused on organic objects, so you had modules looking at different types of organic materials from wood through parchment and paper, and then, by the time you’ve done maybe a year of this type of investigation, you chose an area to specialize in. I specialized in pigments as used in manuscript material. So for my studies, I looked at one Italian miniature painting from the 15th century, it was on parchment, one Chinese pith-paper painting, which is quite an unusual material and which was made in the 19th century, and then one Indian miniature from the 17th century, so they were quite diverse objects. I was very lucky also that, when I graduated, I went straight to a job as a conservator at Cambridge University Library in the UK. I worked there for six years, and then I moved to Dublin, and then I’ve since done this little back-and-forth dance between the UK and Ireland, and I’ve been working as a conservator in my profession for 17 years now.