In the Getty Villa’s mountmaking studio, senior mountmaker Tim Skornia welds together the surface of an aluminum disc and pipe to create a cup. As the tungsten tip of the welder nears the aluminum, it creates an electric current that cleans the metal.
At the Getty Villa’s mountmaking studio, senior mountmaker Tim Skornia stands at a butcher block table, cautiously unpacking an industrial-strength rare-earth magnet from a package.
“Once you take these out and start playing with them,” he says as he rolls a stack of two magnets in the palm of his hand, “you can snap your fingers, break skin.”
The magnets may be dangerous, but they could also help museums all over the world display fragile objects.
Skornia holds two rare earth magnets in the palm of his hand.
The exhibition features 45 ceramics loaned from museums all over the world, including the Museo Maya de Cancún, Museo Larco, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Twelve of those ceramics are delicate stirrup jars with thin necks, and painted scenes on all sides requiring 360-degree viewing. They were scheduled to arrive just two weeks before the exhibition, but preparing the mounts for their arrival took over a year.
The Fabricator
A mountmaker’s work is often invisible to the public. A museum mount—the structure that connects the art object to the display case—should secure the art object without distracting from it. Creating one requires a slew of skills: welding, 3D scanning, machining, and more.
But most of all, it’s a job of making.
The Getty Villa’s mountmaking studio may not look like much to the layperson, but it’s a fabricator’s dream. A large gantry dangles at the center; an earthquake-shake tester lives in a corner. Beside a buzzing 3D printer sits a metal grinder and a small bronze sculpture. A door near the back leads to a separate welding room.
Skornia uses a machine called a lathe.
Skornia, who started out as a metal sculptor, describes himself as a fabricator: someone who turns raw materials into a finished product.
As an artist/maker “You have this desire to create stuff as a maker of anything. Mountmaking fulfills that. It's the process of developing an idea on paper. So, there's drawing, design, fabrication, and, finally, then seeing the execution of it. All that stuff mixed together into a concoction, that's what compels me to do this and keeps me interested…And then you’ve got to be a good problem solver.”
Skornia drops ball bearings into a bowl next to a replica stirrup vase.
The Problem
“We had to come up with a method to secure them safely and be able to mass produce the mounts without having the objects on-site. That’s where I came up with the magnets,” Skornia said.
The idea is simple in theory: an industrial-strength magnet in the bottom of the stirrup jar connects to a magnet in the mount
For months, Skornia tested different industrial-strength magnets, But there were two problems. The first: how to get a magnet inside of the stirrup jar’s thin neck (and back out when the exhibition is over).
The second: how to connect the industrial-strength magnets—which can snap together with enough force to break the skin on your fingers—without breaking the stirrup jars.
Skornia decided to solve the latter problem first.
For his first tests, Skornia used an existing prototype: a magnet mount. A lever in its base lifted the magnet in the display case to attach it to the magnet in the vase, then lowered it to disengage it.
Skornia turned the lever on an existing magnet mount. The magnet was engaged and disengaged using a lever, but the physical force required to turn the lever was too dangerous to apply around fragile objects.
Unfortunately, the physical force required to turn the lever and pull apart the industrial-strength magnets was too much to use around the fragile stirrup jars.
So he ditched the magnet mount for a magnet cup. The cup attached to the magnets allowing him to slide them away from the magnet instead of pulling them.
Skornia turns the wheels on a lathe to drill a hole in the center of an aluminum cup.
The first magnet cup Skornia built used several smaller magnets attached to each other on top of a twist mount. Though the twist allowed the magnets to be removed safely, the area the smaller magnets covered on the bottom of the object was too small and created a pressure point that could possibly damage the object.
This reduced the force needed but introduced a new problem: the small stack of magnets that could fit in the cup was too narrow, creating a pressure point at the base of the vase.
So, he increased the size of the cup to allow for magnets with a larger surface area.
The larger magnet cup Skornia allowed for a connection over a wider area, reducing the pressure point.
In the studio, Skornia twisted the magnet cup into place beneath the replica vase. As he turned the object upside down on the mount it held strong. He flipped it back over so the vase sat upright again and with a soft twist, Skornia was able to loosen its grip and safely remove it from the mount.
Finally, he was satisfied that the magnets could be attached and removed from the actual jars safely. Now, he just needed to find a magnetic connector to get the top magnet in and out of the thin neck of the jar.
Skornia holds the replica vase upside down to test the strength of the magnet.
The connector had to be small and thin enough to be placed inside the vessel without damaging the interior of the object, cover a large enough surface area that it wouldn’t create a pressure point and shatter the bottom of the vessel, and it also needed to be light and easy to remove when the vessel was ready to be taken off display.
The quake test
First, Skornia tried using a chain of ball bearings. But they couldn’t stop the vessel from shaking.
One of the most pressing concerns for mount makers at the Getty is the frequent seismic activity in the Southern California region. With every mount they create, they have to take into consideration the possibility of an earthquake during an object’s display.
The Getty mountmaking team’s answer to this is creating full-capture mounts that completely intersect with an object, so there are no gaps or air between the object and the mount. This lessens any amplification of the shaking caused by an earthquake.
Skornia holds up a string of ball bearings that he experimented with using as a chain to place in the stirrup jar.
“We were trying everything and nothing was working. And I was looking through a drawer for something else, and on an old skeleton key, there was a beaded chain that they used to hang it. And I was like, I wonder.”
Skornia took the chain out of the drawer and dangled it above a magnet, then slowly allowed the chain to touch the magnet’s surface. It began to coil on the magnet in circles. He then ordered a spool of similar chain, and tested again, using yet another souvenir vase he found on Amazon as a makeshift replica stirrup jar.
“I realized the magnet will keep pulling the chain into the vessels until it's had its fill. And that's when you know how much chain you need.”
While a few beads would never create enough pressure to keep a vessel from shaking, Skornia found that three to four feet of chain would keep the object steady on the magnet.
Skornia holds a string of beads he tested as a possible chain to place in the stirrup jar.
Skornia uses a tool he created for this project to pull a thin chain out of the replica stirrup jar.
Skornia uses a tool he created for this project to pull a thin chain out of the replica stirrup jar.
As Skornia feeds the beaded chain onto the magnet inside the cup it loops, slowly covering the surface of the magnet. This is what happens inside of the ceramic vessel.
As Skornia feeds the beaded chain onto the magnet inside the cup it loops, slowly covering the surface of the magnet. This is what happens inside of the ceramic vessel.
Before Skornia could move forward with the project, he had to know if the mount would survive on the earthquake shake table.
“You can speculate and you can come up with as many theories as you want, but until you actually test it and see it physically, you don't ever know,” he said.
“At that moment I was like, please don't fail. And it worked. And it was a big win. But then I was like, okay, how am I going to replicate this again and again?"
Show and Tell
After nearly a year of work, Tim Skornia had created a magnetic mount that could both hold down the object during a quake and easily twist on and off to allow careful placement and removal. It was time to show the lenders what he had been working on. Would they approve the use of this new method or would he have to start all over again?
“You are always nervous in front of lending institutions, you obviously don't want any issues. But sometimes you have to perform in front of people, and most [mount makers] aren't performers. We don't like to be in the spotlight. You're always thinking of this stuff ahead of time like, "If this fails."
Skornia was excited to hear that 11 of the 12 stirrup jars were approved. His groundbreaking new mounts, the first of their kind, were going on display.
“If one of us is better, we’re all better.”
The aluminum shell of the magnet cup was crucial to Skornia’s mission. Not just because it works well as an unpolarized, safe holster for a magnet. But because it’s accessible.
The materials Skornia used in the magnet cups are from a website called McMaster-Carr, the site where most mount makers in the United States and Canada shop. After Picture Worlds, his goal is to create a shopping list that he will share at the International Mountmakers Forum this fall with colleagues from all over the world.
“They can just go to that list and say, ‘I want this magnet and these cup sizes,’ and that's it. And they can glue the aluminum cups together. They don't need to be welded. Anybody could make this, and they're fairly inexpensive.”
Each cup costs about $75 in materials and can be recycled over and over again.
“If one of us is better, we're all better. It's very hard to get into this field, and we want to make it easier.
“And hopefully the next generation wants to keep doing this stuff. I mean, you get to build with your hands. It's dirty and messy. Sometimes it's really stressful, but you’ve got to love it. You’ve got to want to not only succeed but to put the best you can out there, the safest, most practical, best solution you can. We publish as much as we can, and we present as much as we can. And I try to build on the foundation that my predecessors laid.”
Picture Worlds is currently on exhibition at the Getty Villa, and will remain up until July 29, 2024.
