Renew and improve
Alicia Coutts and her team at Toronto Art Restoration Inc. are working to preserve Canada’s cultural heritage. Andrea Yu follows the process
My dad believed in me so much that he offered to transform his home office into a studio.
ALICIA COUTTS
Alicia Coutts can often be seen wielding a paintbrush. But instead of creating art of her own, as a conservator she’s ensuring that the work of others stands the test of time.
For a recent travelling exhibition of the Sobey family’s private collection, Coutts was hired to ensure that a group of 14 works, including paintings by Lawren Harris, Emily Carr and Jean-Paul Riopelle, could survive the cross-country journey. So, over the course of two months, Coutts and her team at Toronto Art Restoration Inc. worked to restore the paintings. Stabilizing cracks in paint, with a technique called consolidation, is one important step. “It’s the process of carefully feeding low-viscosity, conservation-grade adhesive into the natural cracks of a painting,” Coutts explains. The paintings, along with dozens of other works, are on display at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg until May 23, before moving to St. John’s, Edmonton, Charlottetown and Halifax later this year and into 2023.
Coutts hadn’t planned on becoming a restorer. After graduating from OCAD and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in the late aughts, she wanted to be a painter, sculptor and photographer. But a trip to Florence, Italy, changed her course. There, she visited a former restoration studio where her grandfather had sent important paintings for safekeeping before escaping from Poland during the Second World War. The studio had since become an arts college. “The head conservation professor gave me a tour,” she says, “and I instantly knew it was where I was supposed to be.”
Finding work as an art restorer in Toronto was a challenge amid 2008’s global recession, so Coutts decided to start her own business out of her parents’ house in the Annex. “My dad believed in me so much that he offered to transform his home office into a studio,” she says.
Coutts established herself by working on small paintings and sculptures. “Mostly family heirlooms,” she says. By 2011, she had moved out of her parents’ house and into her own studio, hiring two conservators to join the operation. As Coutts’s business expanded, so did requests to handle largerscale projects. She went from working on private home collections to restoring art for public spaces, museums and corporations.
These days, the range of works that Toronto
Art Restoration repairs is vast and varied, from archival documents to church murals to outdoor mosaics. After a massive fire damaged the York Memorial Collegiate Institute in 2019, Coutts’s team restored a multi-sectioned mural by Canadian modernist John Hall. “It was blackened by soot deposits and blanched white from the moisture and heat of the fire,” Coutts recalls. Her team was able to clean the mural, then attach it to stronger panels to be safely reinstalled after the school’s renovation.
Last January, Coutts’s team spent five nights rappelled from the ceiling of the Eaton Centre, removing 60 geese sculptures (known collectively as “Flight Stop” by Michael Snow) and individually crating them to be stored and gradually restored at her studio over the next year. And in February, Coutts and crew travelled to the Strathcona County Hall in Edmonton to restore a mural by Indigenous artist Alex Janvier that surrounds a spiral staircase in the main hall.
Not all projects require complete restoration, such as a portrait of two siblings holding hands owned by a family that had fled Europe for Canada during the Holocaust. “They managed to cut the painting out of its frame, roll it and fold it up, and bring it back to Canada,” Coutts explains. “It was key to keep many of the signs of distress, such as cracks and rips that resulted from being transported so quickly, to maintain the historic memory of the traumatic event.”
Every piece of art that Coutts and her team restores is helping to retain and preserve the country’s cultural heritage. Besides the Eaton Centre’s “Flight Stop,” locally Coutts has worked on the sculpture garden outside the Ontario Superior Court of Justice on University Avenue and the Coca-Cola sculpture at Exhibition Place.
It’s especially important for Coutts, who is of Indian and Jewish descent, to see more diversity in her field. In 2020, with the Canadian Association for Conservation of Cultural Property, she developed a grant for students that self-identify as Black, Indigenous or a person of colour. “The conservation community is about 90 per cent white,” Coutts says. “It means that there are key voices missing in the decision-making processes of what and how our cultural heritage is conserved in Canada.”