Fill material for polychrome sculpture

I am a furniture conservation student from Finland working on a East
Asian Bodhisattwa statue dated from around 1900, from the Qing
dynasty. The statue is made of wood and the backing material is
gypsum, surface finnish is lacquer and gilding. There are traces of
urushi lacquer with a lot of retouched places using wax and shellac.
The problem is that the wood underneath the surface has shrunk so
that there are hollow places all over the statue basically. What
kind of filling material could I use to fill these hollow parts and
should I make holes in to those places where the surface is still
intact to get the hollow bit filled? Would anybody have some kind of
experience with this kind of polychrome sculptures?

Katja Cadogan
Furniture conservation student


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                  Conservation DistList Instance 21:62
                  Distributed: Saturday, May 24, 2008
                       Message Id: cdl-21-62-018
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