RESTORATION experts are continuing their hard work to stabilise one of the fire-damaged casts from the Glasgow School of Art.

In the disastrous 2014 fire at the Mackintosh Building, which partially destroyed the west end of the famous building, many of the school’s famous plaster casts were damaged.

Graciela Ainsworth and her colleagues are now at work conserving the 100-year-old plaster casts, made from statues.

Of the 224 in the building, four were destroyed and 12 severely damaged, while others were blackened by soot.

The plaster on many surviving casts has become brittle and are now being restored by Ms Ainsworth, of Edinburgh, and her team at Graciela Ainsworth Sculpture Conservation.

Polly Christie, the conservation specialist for the restoration of the Mackintosh Building, said the darkened plaster would not be hidden, replaced or painted over, but left as a “marker of what happened in 2014”.

The casts are being cleaned but also stabilised, as the fire had made the plaster anhydrous, lacking water, and thus extremely brittle and liable to “collapse into a pile of dust” if moved. Chemicals to consolidate the plaster have been added to maintain their forms.

Ms Christie said the final placing of the restored plaster casts had not yet been confirmed but “more likely than not” will remain in their prominent positions in the Mackintosh Building.

The destroyed casts, she said, will not be replaced.

The casts have been, for many years, the models for generations of fine arts students.

For students who could not afford to see the original marble statues in Rome, Florence, the Louvre or Greece they have been an aesthetic tool of great importance.

They include Dying Captive, Rebel Slave, two Medici tombs and the “Bruges” Madonna And Child by Michelangelo, Donatello’s St George and ancient Greek statues such as the Nike, or Winged Victory of Samothrace, the Venus de Milo and the Aphrodite and Dione figures from the East Pediment of the Parthenon.

Ms Ainsworth and her team have worked on a number of high-profile projects including artworks at Hampton Court Palace, south-west London, marble sculptures at the National Museum of Scotland, and painting and gilding at Stirling Palace.

She has also worked on bronze statues at Kelvingrove Park and Elder Park, Glasgow, and the conservation of the plaster cast collection at Edinburgh College of Art and Edinburgh University, including an original cast of Athens’ Parthenon Frieze.