corner cockles

The work done by framers can be essential to preserving artworks and artifacts, but art conservators will sometimes joke with us that they are kept in employment by undoing the damage done by framers.  In all fairness, sometimes those errors were made many years ago, and in the intervening decades both framing technology and the education level of framers have evolved considerably.  And to framers’ credit (and all of us who love art, artifacts, pictures, heirlooms), we do not live in museums and their regulated environments, outside of which even the most thoughtfully constructed frame package and its contents can suffer when light is too strong, humidity is too high, and other vagaries of time, energy exposure, and accidents or mishandling are brought into the equation.

Cockling is a term referring to the planar distortion of paper works due to a variety of factors, but can arise due to the way works are held into mats and frames. Works of art on paper, when matted, are more typically held in place with paper and paste attachments;  and while a well made hinge should be completely reversible, imperfections in the application of a hinge can alter the structure of paper and leave difficult to remove residue in the paper fibers.  One technique which can be favorable  for certain works, especially certain kinds of photographs, involves corner mounts.  Most typically, corner mounts are either preformed out of clear and inert synthetic materials, or hand folded using preservation grade papers.

In theory corner mounts are great because they allow one to mount a picture into a mat without using any adhesives coming into direct contact with the artwork.  But there are pitfalls, illustrated in the picture I share here from a matted photograph which we recently took out of a frame Because paper is made from once living fibers, those fibers are hygroscopic and will swell and contract with changes in temperature and humidity.  In this instance, there may have been other factors contributing to the kinds of ripples seen in this detail, but I believe the print was framed at a relatively low humidity level, with the corner mounts fitted perhaps a bit too snugly onto the work.  Later, when the work found its way into a higher humidity environment, the sheet of paper had nowhere to move when it expanded and thus began to cockle from the resulting pressure against those mounts.

Another possible downside of corner mounts vs. hinges is that as the size of a print increases–which may also have been going on with the work which gave rise to this post–is that the paper may want to bow forward when it swells or expands.  When using hinges, the artwork tends to hang in the mat from attachments at its top edge, rather than being held without direct adhesives at all four corners.  In general, works hanging from hinges at the top only, with adequate room for those once-living fibers to move, will have less possibilities for such planar distortion.

There is so much more to say about ways in which works are attached onto supporting structures which go into frames, and there is much room for things to behave in ways we do not expect.  As with all methodologies, corner mounting is not an inherently poor technique to use.  Quite the contrary, in certain instances it is the best answer for mounting certain works into mats and frames.  The photograph which gave rise to this post is now safely in a conservator’s hands, and the prospects look good.  Still, this presents an instance where art mirrors life, and even the best laid plans of thoughtful framers can go wrong due to unintended consequences or unanticipated conditions.