Artist Listens To The Trees

Connections and networks run through artist Rita Hannafin’s work on a few different levels. 

First literally, as her chosen medium is the art quilt, which deploys thread itself in complex ways. Hannafin’s art for decades has also drawn strength and inspiration from the networks and communities of artists around her, as she finds advice from friends and fellow practitioners helps guide her work. Finally, in Hannafin’s latest show — ​“Whispering Forest and Other Conversations,” running now at City Gallery through March 30 — she has chosen as her subject the book Finding the Mother Tree, which details the science behind trees and how they cooperate and communicate through fungal networks running under the forest floor.

“In this work, I explore hidden connections that link trees and all living things. Suzanne Simard’s book, Finding the Mother Tree, has helped me see the unseen,” Hannafin writes in a personal statement. ​“Trees are so much more than silent sentinels that house birds and squirrels. 

“Each tree is part of a complex network through their roots and fungal connections, sharing resources, signals, even warnings. This silent concert inspires me. It embodies the essence of community and collaboration. One tree’s sacrifice benefits the whole. It speaks to the universal truths of interdependence, resilience, and the delicate balance of life. All nature is energy that connects each of us. We are all linked, from the network of electrical pulses in a heartbeat, to an intimate and amazing sunset, to a close-up of a simple flower.”

“Using organic and salvaged materials,” the statement concludes, ​“I strive to evoke a sense of wonder and relationship. This energy will remain long after we are gone.”

“I come from a traditional quilting background,” Hannafin said in an interview at the gallery. ​“I’ve always loved fabric and textiles, and I’ve sewn all my life.” She began about 40 years ago, and loved making scrap quilts, but over time ​“I got bored with a pattern where every one had to be the same.” 

She found new directions in her peers; in a life spent moving around the country, from Arizona to Virginia to Connecticut, ​“I made my friends through the local quilt guild.” In those guilds, ​“there was always a group doing more art-related things, and those are the ones I gravitated to.” She discovered a love of vibrant colors, and in a museum in Virginia saw her first quilted art piece. Art quilting has only grown over time, as organizations like the Modern Quilt Guild ​“are taking the traditional quilt into completely contemporary direction,” Hannafin said. About 12 years ago, Hannafin decided to make art quilts herself.

“I find that getting more experimental takes a lot of confidence, so it’s taken me a long time to get there,” she said. ​“But it’s never too late.”

Hannafin found the spark for her latest round of art making in Finding the Mother Tree, a book that’s part memoir, part forestry and biology, and part spirituality. Author Suzanne Simard takes readers through her life, starting as a child to a logging father in the forests of British Columbia, proceeding through her work in forestry and biology. She details the pioneering scientific work she did in explaining how trees cooperate and communicate at least as often as they compete, and the further work she had to do in getting her ideas to stick in the scientific community. Just as often, she points out that, in a sense, her work has been only rediscovering what Native American people have always known. And finally, she takes readers through her life in explaining how her work in the woods has changed her as a human being. As she writes in the beginning of Finding the Mother Tree, ​“this is not a book about how we can save the trees. This is a book about how the trees might save us.”

“I feel that nature’s very spiritual,” Hannfin added, but she also appreciated that Finding the Mother Tree was also ​“like a detective story” — first with Simard learning that the way her family and the Native Americans logged ​“was working, and it had been like that for centuries, and they had made a living — and they had healthy forests.”

“I respect so much that she had to fight against this big old boy network” to have her findings accepted. And like many readers, she found great meaning in the way Simard describes a dying old tree giving away its nutrients in the end, to ​“let the young ones come up.”

The three pieces entitled Whispering Forest are most explicitly tied to the book, as the quilt shows the trees, soil, and mycelial networks moving between the roots that create the network through which the plants can help nourish one another. The exploration, connection, and cooperation among the trees that Hannafin depicts in the pieces extends to the way Hannafin created the pieces.

The Whispering Forest series took her a year to make. ​“I usually work from photographs,” Hannafin said, but not this time. ​“This is a whole new different thing,” and ​“I had no idea where I was going to start, what it was going to be, and I just began drawing and getting ideas.” She took as her subject the specific trees Simard talks about in her book — aspen and fir — but ​“I didn’t have any pattern,” she said.

In exploring how to finish the piece, Hannafin drew from the suggestions of other City Gallery artists at monthly critiques the members hold. One suggestion led her to use materials she’d never used before, certain fibers and laces. Another observation led to her painting parts of the piece by hand.

“You’re there at a crit for a reason, and we learn how to do it objectively,” Hannafin said, letting the collective wisdom of the gallery members guide her work, and help her know when it was done.

But the show overall contains a mixture of new and older pieces, and is in some sense a retrospective of Hannafin’s work for the past several years. This reveals, for starters, that Hannafin’s interest in dealing with environmental concerns has a long track record. Beauty and the Beast is a view of Bridgeport’s harbor, which from certain angles is dominated by the silhouette of a power plant.

Hannafin currently lives in Black Rock with her husband, and ​“when we first moved here, whenever we would come down Route 8 and make that right turn onto 95,” in the evening ​“there was a blazing sunset” as a fiery backdrop to the smokestack she and her husband called the ​“candy cane.”

“The shoreline is beautiful, and yet we can all see the pollution.” She can see the smokestack from her attic window, where her studio is. ​“This was my way of showing pollution,” how it enters the air and the water, ​“and we know what it’s doing to the water.” But she’s also attuned to the way nature finds a way to persist; it will, most likely, outlast us in some form or another.

Hannafin’s faith in nature, meanwhile, is its own abiding concern. Near the door is the oldest piece in the show — the first piece Hannafin made that wasn’t a traditional quilt. It’s a view from her window from the house she lived in before moving to Bridgeport, and in it, the works of human hands are a distant shape, half-obscured by the pattern of tree trunks and almost blurred by the vivid sky.

Since making that piece, Hannafin said, her art practice has changed. For starters, now ​“I call it work,” Hannafin said. ​“One of my best friends keeps saying, ​‘oh no, you want to be playing, having fun.’ And it is fun. But I’ve learned it’s also the way of expressing something inside of me.” That expression ​“is painful sometimes, and you feel like you’re naked,” exposed. ​“I can make a quilt and give it away,” but ​“what I do really is personal.” She can spend hours in the studio working nonstop; ​“I get an idea and I latch onto it, like a pit bull,” she said. 

One of those ideas, increasingly, has been to explore the question of how to communicate most effectively the importance and the benefits of connecting with the world around us. ​“Nature’s becoming more important as we go through climate change, and even more important with the political situation,” Hannafin said. It’s ​“something that’s here and will be here, as we don’t mess it up too much.”

“Whispering Forest and Other Conversations” runs at City Gallery, 994 State St., through March 30. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.