Viiu Niiler of Marshfield, Vermont, is the consummate artist: a lifelong painter, glassmaker, tapestry weaver, fashion designer, gourmet cook, master gardener, and musician. Considered a kind of artistic holobiont – an assemblage of a host and the diverse species that live in or around it – Niiler braids all the facets of her life together to form a single creative expression that moves with a curated harmony.
Birch Copse is one of a series of six paintings of the same cluster of trees. Niiler draws on site in a landscape that inspires her, often creating dozens of drawings, exploring changing light, shifting perspectives, and emphasizing different aspects of the scene. Back in the studio, she translates these studies into a series of paintings on large pieces of watercolor paper that address her communication with the natural environment.
In this series, Niiler celebrates the idea of community existing among trees. She taps into recent conversations about tree communications, from Richard Powers’s The Overstory to Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest and Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees. These authors suggest that trees use a complex network of signals to communicate with each other and form bonds with other trees and species to create a super organism. Niiler notes that in her painting, the birches’ dark markings are hieroglyphics, a language that records the trees’ observations and experiences; through this work we can sense a dialogue happening that is ongoing and communal. The trees have individual characters and at the same time exhibit a sense of lively camaraderie and conversation.
This dance of birch trees is akin to the rich dialogue that is Viiu Niiler’s remarkable life as an artist.