Ladies and gentlemen, thank you ever so much for coming along today,
and it's my great pleasure to share with Virginia from the first presentation, which is very much an introductory take.
As we've seen, it's weaving our heritage, the conservation, scientific analysis and display of the Shelden Tapestry maps.
What are the wonderful coincidences? This whole project has been?
The fact that the tapestries hung at Western House and here we are now in the Western Library is a glorious little story.
I think as far as we're concerned, it just fits perfectly.
So let's see what are we going to talk about some general history of the maps?
For those of you who aren't familiar with them,
I'm guessing that most of you in the audience are very familiar with these mountains, but certainly some, I suspect, aren't.
The Sheldon Tapestry maps here at the battalion.
We have three from a set of four, which were produced by four Ralph Sheldon for his house Weston House,
which I showed earlier in South Warwickshire, and this happened in around 50 9C.
The tapestries of surviving tapestries, if you imagine what they would have looked like when they were completed or weren't named
wool and silk and the likely to have reached a dimension of somewhere between 13 by 20 feet.
For those of you who preferred metric four to six and a half metres, they're big things you'll have seen Oxfordshire outside.
That gives you an idea, although that is by no means its full extent.
Gloucestershire, as Richard has mentioned, was acquired selection in June 2007.
Oxfordshire and Worcestershire were bequeathed to the library by Richard Gough in eighteen hundred and nine parts of the magnificent golf bequest,
which contained an awful lot more than two tapestry maps.
Oxfordshire you can see outside Gloucestershire, which was the piece which we acquired at auction,
is currently visible and on display in the Talking Maps exhibition just across the corridor.
So if you've got a moment at lunchtime, you can go along and have a look at that.
There is evidence if you look at it, Richard referred to it as being part of a fire guard.
You can still see in the northern suburbs of Bristol, slightly blackened in colour, where I think it must have been charred so you can see that.
So the tapestries provenance is extremely well documented. Well, the identity of the individual tapestry makers is uncertain.
Although Richard Hicks is likely to have been heavily involved, Hicks was appointed head of the Royal.
Harris works in sixty nine. And here we see his name.
Now this is on the Worcestershire tapestry map, which currently isn't on display here,
but there this is name provenance above the scale bar, which is in the southwest corner of the map in the area just to the west of Hereford.
So what do we already know about these type of stories?
Commissioned by shells in the 1890s, Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire and Worcestershire passed the bodley collection,
I'm delighted to say that Sarah Magee from Warwickshire will be speaking about the Warwickshire Tapestry,
which is held by Warwickshire County Council in Warwick Museums, so learn much more about that today, which is absolutely fantastic.
They were designed to hang in Western House Shelden seats, and the tapestries remained in situ until their dispersal in 1781.
In terms of cartography, they were heavily based on Sexton's county maps of the 15 seventies, and Peter Barber will be telling us more about this.
Hillary Turner will be telling us more in the afternoon about that construction of the tapestries themselves.
Somewhere between seven or eight times the size of Sexton's map.
So just imagine the enlargement that's gone on to produce these tapestries from what a quite small paper maps you.
Again, if you go into the Talking Maps exhibition, you can see the Gloucestershire map produced by Saxon in 15 77.
It's alongside the tapestry. Too much show north at the top.
To show east at the top. So for me, with my cartographic brain, I think very much so graphically, this is a real problem.
If you imagine you have Worcestershire US-North North at the top, Oxfordshire has north at the top.
But Warwickshire and Gloucestershire of East at the top.
So they don't really join together satisfactorily.
And one thing which I would love to do at some stage is get digital imaging images of the lot and beam
them onto a floor and try and walk through them up and see whether we can make any great sense of it.
So it's an interesting geographical challenge.
Finally, Sheldon's friends and relatives houses do feature prominently on the tapestry on the tapestries.
The main geographical content is pure Saxton, but there are additions.
This gives you an idea as to how big the tapestries are, this was Worcestershire when it was being installed in 2015.
So there we are, just wandering alone, popping it into place.
And here's a close up just to show you the intricacy, the colour, the pure joy of these tapestries.
This is an extract from Worcestershire. Here's Western House.
For those of you familiar with this part of the world, we have the Rolling Stones down here.
And here we have the four Shi'as Stone, which is on the A44, which runs from Chipping Norton down here to Morton in March.
Marsh that stone or a version of it is still there, marking the four counties which join, although today only three counties join that.
This detached part of Gloucestershire sorry, this detached part of Worcestershire is now in Gloucestershire,
so you can see there's the This is Worcestershire in Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Oxfordshire and Warwickshire all joining at one point.
It's a rather sort of ground breaking stone sculpture of stone block, with each county marked on there.
So well worth seeing. I'm here is western in all its glory.
Very impressive. And this is where Western is for those of you where western walls is the A3 400 on this little lane here.
There are no signposts at either end of it or a couple grids here and here, but it's well worth just wandering along there.
It is publicly accessible. You're quite high up, it's woodland.
There are a couple of buildings which still have Western in their name, but Western House has long since disappeared.
So the Tapestry Maps retweets the library by Gough in 1909, there were transferred to the VirnetX for safekeeping in 1913,
and they didn't come back until 2012, as Richard mentioned.
Once we realised that we had the space to accommodate them and so Virginia, if you would like to continue the story.
Thank you, Nick. Hello, everyone. It's lovely to see such a nice audience.
And we have so we had these magnificent tapestries and it is part of our core collections here at the West Indies,
the set of beautiful woven stories that we see on these maps.
And we then needed to know what to do with them.
I am a paper conservator. I'm also head of conservation here at the podium, and I have never woven anything in my life.
So I needed to understand in terms of the physicality of these objects what what we have to do with them for the conservation.
We couldn't possibly conserve these ourselves. So of course, the next logical step to take was to invite experts to see them.
So we we enrolled them, we enrolled them at the Ashmolean Ashmolean museum,
who were so kind to give us an empty gallery to actually open such big pieces and we
invited different people to to see them amongst those potential prospect on this,
but also the people who would be participating in the tender in the tender campaign that we did.
We invited UK based companies, textiles conservation companies.
All of them competed in a fair way.
And we were very, very pleased to finally invite National Trust to become our conservation treatment partners for these project.
And I've grown up as a conservative, I've grown as a conservator.
I think by working with our colleagues, we have National Trust.
I see that conservation projects are not just a paper or book conservation projects, methodologies.
The research, the materiality, the making of things. Everything has a common threats are common wolf threats.
If you like wool and silk, in this case, that brings together lots of different disciplines.
In the end of the day, it's on heritage. And obviously, we, we we we see things in that way now and the next slide.
Do I know how to do this? Yeah, this is showing you how we unroll the tapestries at the museum.
And we were looking at the very this colour tapestry at that time that the dustry or fox, which as you can see,
and we've now changed that you can see the tapestry outside if you haven't had yet a chance to see it later on a tea break,
we can we can talk to you a little bit about it.
But the radical change the before and after picture is the thing that I would most highlight after participating in this process.
Conservation treatments not always produce that huge contrast between before and after treating badly,
and we do have a rule as a blanket rule generally, which is to keep objects or return objects to stability.
And for that, not always, we have to change them hugely.
Sometimes it's just having a little touch stabilising them in a way that people can use them when they are safe to store and to prolong their life.
In this case, that's what's happened to. But also, we have seen an incredibly dramatic change between the before and after which Rachel Langley liked
to run from National Trust to act one of the expert conservatives who who carried out this work.
I will show you very well with with her talk. So this is the kind of image I know I wanted to say that,
but I think we should mention that the campaign raised about two hundred and forty
between two hundred and fourteen bits and two hundred and fifty thousand pounds.
That money is for the conservation of the tapestry spent that involves a lot of research,
and that involves a lot of work that is not just the hands on work and the treatment work.
For that reason, we wanted to team up with with other, with other institutions and other experts, not just National Trust,
but other people who came into our intern work group and are the scientists of the national,
the National Museums of Scotland at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Also, the scientific research department participated in this and and other colleagues and in other different in different places that,
you know, with just an exchange of emails helped us understand the reality of the tapestries.
So the questions, the research questions are what I wanted to get out and we will be illustrating those through the day with different talks.
And my colleague Alex and I will talk about the scientific analysis later on.
But the research questions are not just material, they're historical and but answering material questions can help those historic questions.
Nick was was talking about how mysterious it is.
The way to know who actually made the tapestry is really that.
How the workshops were like, where they were based, where they built,
especially for these tapestries, where they actually workshops that were well established already.
So all of those things have questions still, and I'm not sure how close we are to answering those.
However, we did not know scientifically what we had in those tapestries.
And that's one thing that was really bugging me, and I thought, Well,
we better analyse these have scientific proof of what, you know, the tapestries containing them.
This is, for example, dyes or the kind of fleece that was used to produce the wool or the silk.
And so I felt that we needed to take that step not just conserve tapestries, but actually know exactly what we have here physically.
And that's one of the reasons why the partnership was was established.
But of, of course, if we know which things have been used for the walls, we might actually have an indication of where those colours came from,
and they might actually tell us where that wool was designed or produced.
And only just if you know, not always that is the case, but we are a little step closer if we get that information confirmed by a scientific analysis.
So we'll reach it earlier on and make a little bit talked about the installation, how complex that process was.
I just simply wanted to say that it was a pleasure working with the architects, Wilkinson and there, who understood the needs,
understood how peculiar this display was because we didn't want to give a final date for the display.
We said, Actually, let's not put a limit.
It's just think of how we set up a preservation programme that is actually telling us during the process of display how the tapestries are doing.
Another reason why knowing the pigments that are contained in the tapestry and another
reason why and monitoring very closely was an important aspect of this project.
So a preservation plan will again come back to this topic later on.
But as you can see, this is this is the making.
This is black hole in the making. What you see and this is the showcase in the making that you will later on are you must have seen a site already at.
The showcase features a pull up frame that allows the tapestry to be installed and attached to a
backing in situ UV filter glazing blinds to reduce light exposure at site public opening hours.
So there's plans that goes on when the family leaves.
That leaves the black hole and protection from both sides because this is a tapestry that is very close to a cafe.
It's the main one of the main features in the black hole where a lot of events take place.
Lots of people come through every day through our doors, luckily, unfortunately, with interest in our collections.
And of course, they are again stunned by the beauty of the tapestries,
and they stand there looking and finding places, names and places that are familiar to them.
I think that's key a very important aspect of this tapestry. People don't seem to get tired of actually doing that.
So we needed a very special showcase, quite expensive. I can't remember the exact figure, but that's costing us a bit of money.
But we know it would be worth it because it's taking us through quite a few years of this play,
and I'm sure there will be other other things we can do later on with these shows.
And I don't want to go over my time, but I think I'm still OK.
Richard also mentioned the media attention the public campaign and at the beginning of was part of the Western,
just launching the West and talking about the Western and the tapestries where we're part of it, as well as a very important feature, as you know.
But also through the years, we've seen that there's been different obstacles and different people wanting to write about
them and wanting to alert the public about what was going on with these fabulous pieces.
I still remember the exhibition at the British Museum about Shakespeare.
I'm not sure if you remember that when I say must have been 2011 20, 2012.
So whereabouts and I remember the Warwickshire tapestry was on display there,
and it was quite an awkward space because there wasn't distance to actually detach from it and take a good look at the whole piece.
And I don't think that was the case. I don't think it was the reason for people to actually accumulate next to the tapestry.
What I observed that time is that that tapestry and they went in on purpose just because I knew this was going to happen.
And what I observed at the time is that I well, I thought that was one of the stark pieces of the show.
It really stole people's hearts to see the Warwickshire tapestry and people were they just.
Coming up and then they could and actually go through,
some people could not get through to the rest to see the rest of the exhibition, and they say, Well,
you know how lucky we are that we are going to have black hole and how lucky we are that we have time to alert people about what's going on and
advertise this in a way that people can come find themselves in a very big space and just even take a look at the tapestries as they look at weavers,
maybe showing how the technique is or maybe will, as you know, people who will be dying.
And we're hoping today, you know, we're hoping to do this kind of thing and.
So that's that's pretty much what I wanted to say and also thank everyone who participated in this project.
It's a long list of names and they will keep popping up through the day.
They've already some of them have upset, but mostly are donors who but Richard mentioned already without them, this wouldn't have been possible.
The conservation, the research, the travelling to Blickling state, the travelling to Michigan,
which you know, is where the tapestries were, where things are very interesting process.
You will you will learn about today. And thanks to you so far for being here, for it, for just keeping us company, doing design.
To learn more and to talk about the project. That's very close to our hearts.
I think so. Thanks very much.