Connections/Details

My name is Cristina Balloffet Carr, and I'm a conservator of textiles.

My topic today is details, and how the details pull you into the whole.

It's not until you focus in on everything that you have some sense of what this is about, what's inside of this painting.

It's like you're rebuilding the whole.

My family moved to New York from Argentina. I didn't learn English until I was five. And my memories are completely visual, certainly for my early schooling, but really even throughout my life.

My father was an engineer. He was a man of science, but he did love music and he did love art. He loved these heads, and I was so struck by his choice of object, because they were so otherworldly. And he never wanted to talk, in fact he hated talking in the museum.

He liked people to just shut up and look at the art. And we would stand there, silently, and it almost became like a trance-like effect, you were just

being pulled in. And I began to see so much detail that

I would not have...I would not have seen if I hadn't just been standing there. It is the thing that, I have to say, connected me with my husband, because he's a painter.

He was just so in love with Bonnard, with the color and the juxtapositions of the people. And he also didn't actually talk that much about it, but we would stand there, and he would be drawing, and sometimes we'd be standing there for quite a while.

It was being made to stop and look. It's such a basic part of my job here as

a conservator of textiles to look at things very closely

and understand as much as possible about the physical material. When you look at objects

under magnification, these images are cranked up to thirty times, you forget that

this is something that is falling apart, and you just

see the object for its own life, its own personality, its own

physical existence. It's like you're giving back some of its

life in the sharpness of the detail and the unexpectedness of it.

Looking at these embroideries, there's no way you cannot be struck with them because they're so quirky and they are so sumptuous. But when I zeroed in

on this half-inch square, I was pushing away the overall object, the parts that were lost.

When they first kind of loomed up under the microscope, they just blew me away, they were so beautiful. Because they have a lot of metal thread, there's silver and gilt silver, when I was looking at them magnified

what I was seeing was the light and the colors reflected in the metal. And when I looked at the object again

I looked at it differently because I had some visual information. It's not something you can read about. Anything that you come into closely

you will see the light in it.