Duncan has wide experience of conserving and restoring all types of ceramic objects, including:

• Porcelain (hard-paste and soft-paste)
• Stoneware
• Pottery
• Tiles
• Earthenware, including Delft
• Lustre ware
• Terracotta
• Archaeological ceramics

Objects are assessed and a course of treatment and a cost estimate are agreed before any practical work is carried out. Typical treatments involve cleaning the object, dismantling old repairs, bonding the broken sections, filling any missing areas, and retouching (to match missing decorative detail) using acrylics or pigments as appropriate. Any missing gilding can be replaced using gold leaf or gold powder. Missing details such as finials, hands, bocage and other decorative features are modelled to match the original as closely as possible.

For porcelain and other suitable objects, colour-filling techniques are employed using bulked epoxy resin, tinted with pigments to match the colour and translucency of the original. This method produces sympathetic outcomes in which the obscuring of original surfaces is minimised.

Examples

Large 1970s stoneware platter by Shōji Hamada, tenmoku glaze. Bonded with gelled Epo-tek 301-2 epoxy resin, filled with same resin bulked with fumed silica and coloured with dry pigments. Challenging replication of colour, sheen and texture of glaze using dotted gelled epoxy on top of colour fill.

Chinese earthenware wall vase in the form of a cicada. Bonded with Paraloid B-72, filled with Flügger acrylic putty, retouched with Golden Acrylics.

Romano-British flagon, cleaned, bonded with Paraloid B-72, void filled with Alpha plaster, retouched with Golden Acrylics. Extensive research suggested that the neck may have been damaged in antiquity, having been left protruding from a grave for libations; a decision was therefore made not to replace that area.