The founding convenor, a conservator turned forensic art historian, responsible for the course's shape and its weekly studio programme.
- Role
- Convenor
- Affiliation
- Slop University School of Material Deception
- petra.voss@slop.university
- Contact
- Email for anything about the course as a whole; bring studio-specific questions to the studio itself, since half the value is watching someone else's turn out wrong.
Petra spent eleven years re-lining damaged canvases before a routine cleaning turned up a signature that had no business being there, and the six months of pigment analysis that followed taught her more about painting than the conservation degree that came before it. She has been chasing that particular kind of lesson ever since: the fastest way to understand how a real thing is made is to try to make a convincing fake of it, and fail in a way that tells you exactly what you left out.
She designed this course around that failure. Every studio ends with someone’s copy not quite landing, and the reason it didn’t is the actual content of the week.