Cécilia Gauvin – Technical Art History Group

Colour portrait photograph of Cécilia Gauvin, researcher and TAHG member at the University of Glasgow

Dr Cécilia Gauvin

Research Assistant in Polymer Mechanics

History of Art, University of Glasgow

Current Projects

Cécilia worked with us as a research assistant on the IMPASTOW (mechanisms of fatigue In Multilayer Paint SysTems On Wood) research project. This project focuses on understanding crack initiation and propagation in painted wooden cultural heritage induced by environmental changes. Cases studies focus on C17th Northern panel paintings from the National Trust, England but we will also be looking for case studies of painted wood from our own Hunterian collections.

Colour photograph of the Knole House Portrait of Thomas Sackville (courtesy of the National Trust) — Knole House Portrait of Thomas Sackville (courtesy of the National Trust)

Colour photograph showing a close up image of network of cracks on a wooden panel painting for the IMPASTOW project — Example of a crack network network on a wooden panel painting

Colour photograph showing a close up image of minor cracks on a wooden panel painting for the IMPASTOW project — Example of minor cracks on a wooden panel painting

Biography

Cécilia has a PhD in Wood Science from Montpellier University and has been part of cultural heritage projects in the France and the Netherlands. She has just finished as post-doc on the Climate4Wood project studying the hygro-mechanical behaviour of a decorated wooden furniture and panel paintings from the Rjksmuseum collections in collaboration with Eindhoven University.

Before joining our Technical Art History Group as a post-doc on the IMPASTOW project, Cécilia was a post-doc at Eindhoven University within the Climate4Wood project. This project which was in collaboration with the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands and Delft University of Technology, focused on the climate effects of decorated wooden panels as part of the Science4Arts programme. Dr Gauvin is also part of the team for the annual day-check of the Mona Lisa panel painting at the Louvre museum, Paris, France. Her PhD research at Mechanical and Civil Engineering Laboratory, Montpellier University was an experimental and numerical study of the hygro-mechanical behaviour of a wooden painted panels.