Conservation Now
Replacing missing fingers and toes with 3D printing technology
Objects Conservator Paula Artal-Isbrand
O
ver the past two years, Objects Conservator Paula Artal-Isbrand has gone through the painstaking process of cleaning the 19th-century sculpture, Shipwrecked Mother and Child, by Edward Augustus Brackett. Acquired by the Museum in 1904, the sculpture was stored in the basement for 80 years until it was moved to the Jeppson Idea Lab for conservation in December 2019. Visitors have been able to watch as the marble statue, dirty and dingy from decades of exposure to pollution and grime, gradually took on its original brilliant white color.
to 3D technology for the restoration of missing digits. For most of the losses, primarily fingers and toes, their mirror-image counterparts on the other side of the bodies were fortunately undamaged and Academia 50, 3D thus served as prototypes Digitizer for the restorations. The existing fingers and toes were scanned with a high resolution, Academia 50 3D Digitizer from Creaform that WPI acquired for this project.
In early 2020 Artal-Isbrand began a partnership with scientists at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) to prepare for the second conservation treatment phase: replacing toes and fingers that were damaged or lost over the years. For this complex process, Artal-Isbrand worked with graduate student Colin Hiscox and undergraduate student Nathan Kaplan under the supervision of Professor Cosme Furlong-Vazquez, Director of the Laser Holography Lab in the Mechanical Engineering Department.
Then, computer-generated algorithms turned the scanned information into a digital model which was mirrored to produce the
Because the sculpture is a representation of human figures, which are by nature symmetrical, the project lent itself perfectly Hiscox digitizing the sculpture
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Two 3D printed digits
desired shape and size of the missing fingers and toes. These files were ultimately 3D printed by Professor Erica Stults, director of WPI’s Advanced Prototyping Lab. According to Artal-Isbrand and Hiscox, the next phase of the project—fitting the printed prototypes to the sculpture—was the most challenging and time consuming, with Hiscox making numerous trips to the Museum. Because the printed parts did not always perfectly match the surface contours at the break site, the parts needed to be rescaled and reshaped to be consistent with the rest of the sculpture. The challenge did not just involve fitting the pieces seamlessly onto the surface of the sculpture, but also ensuring that the directionality of the replacement digit looked anatomically
