“So these have a bit of a strange history. They came from India, except they do not look Indian at all, I’m pretty sure they are Chinese. There is some Mandarin written on the back of some of them. But a lady who was brought up in India, brought them back with her just before the first World War, to Europe and I’m not sure what they are for. I want to do a little bit of research into what the purpose of them, are they sort of puppets, or just for decoration or… But they are paper, if I turn one over, a sort of card paper backing and then covered in, I think, it’s mostly silk, with these canvas painted faces and what I think is human hair for the beards. And quite a bit of that is quite brittle and broken.
So yeah, I’ve never seen anything like them… you can see here sort of bits of mildew and moth casings and obviously the broken hairs and areas like that which have been eaten by moths. So they just need a bit of stabilization, a little bit of cleaning some of them and then, better storage because they arrived in a box file with a clamp pressed down and they looked a bit sad”.