10:39 a.m., June 29, 2009----“It was a case of a chemist looking for a project and a project looking for a chemist,” said Christina Cole, a University of Delaware doctoral student in preservation studies, whose research involves analyzing the dyes used in highly decorative and colorful quillwork by Native Americans.

THIS STORY

E-mail

Print

Twitter

Cole has been awarded a dissertation fellowship for her work by the American Association of University Women's (AAUW) Educational Foundation. Fellows are “exceptional women whose work promises to enhance such diverse disciplines as biology, philosophy and anthropology,” according to AAUW.

Cole was among the 64 fellows chosen from 1,175 applications and received a $20,000 award.

She also is a Coremans Endowment fellow, which funds doctoral students in art preservation.

Early Native Americans have used the dyed quills of porcupines for intricate, colorful decorative work, predating glass beadwork, for stoles, bags, cradleboards, moccasins, wall hangings and other objects.

Cole recalls when she first became aware of quillwork while working at the Freer/Sackler Galleries and analyzing pigments and dyes in Chinese art. She met a Lakota traditional arts instructor through the National Museum of the American Indian, who commented that no one had analyzed the dyes used in Native American quillwork. She discovered he was right, and her research project was launched, she said.

Unfamiliar with quillwork, Cole said the first time she saw it at the McCord Museum in Montreal, it was “Wow!”

“I was surprised, enchanted and astonished, and it took me a while to start examining quillwork from a clinical point of view,” she said.

Cole is studying quillwork predating the 1850s, but quillwork continues today, she said. One source of quills unfortunately is road kill, she said, with the porcupines dying from salt on the roads. “Or you can throw a blanket over a porcupine and then remove the quills from the blanket,” she said. Porcupines do not throw quills but they are easily detached, and the animals grow new ones.

The quills are sorted by size and dyed and folded to make quillwork.

There have been studies as to what dyes may have been used but none that completely eliminate uncertainty by examining the quillwork itself, Cole said. Thanks to modern technology and her research, many of the dyes now can be accurately pinpointed.

Most of Cole's research is carried out at the National Gallery of Art where she uses their liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry instrument to analyze the dyes of quillwork from several collections.

“My goal is to be as non-invasive as possible, using swabs, for instance, to gather the material and to develop non-destructive methods of analysis,” she said.

“The guesses people have made about the dyes were reasonable,” Cole said. She will be able to confirm that some black dyes are from walnut trees or from tannin, some blues from indigo or wild grapes, some yellows from golden rod, and red/orange dyes from bloodroots. Even poison ivy may have been used as a dye.

By figuring out the dyes, researchers can make better-informed decisions about how to preserve and interpret quillwork, as well as giving information on the dyes to Native American communities, Cole said.

An analytical chemist and conservation scientist, Cole has worked as the sole chemist for the National Air and Space Museum, working on protecting objects in the collection. Before that she was a conservation scientist for the Freer/Sackler galleries working on East Asian paint pigments analysis and also worked for the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.

A graduate of North Carolina State University, Cole has a master's degree in analytical chemistry from the University of Michigan and spent time over two years at Oro e Colore, a restoration school in Italy working on paintings on canvas.

Article by Sue Moncure