In the dusky light of an early autumn evening this week, the walking paths around Mass Audubon’s Boston Nature Center in Mattapan were alive with the satisfying crunch-crunch of fallen leaves underfoot. Life is the point here, in an urban wildlife preserve south of the city core, a haven for all creatures, whether four-footed or two.
Since spring, though, life has been a little different in this leafy expanse of wood and wetland. On the winding path alongside a bog, a squirrel scurried up the thick trunk of an oak and into a large straw hat, one of dozens bunched together like a growth just beneath the tree’s heavy boughs. It was a satisfying signal of an invitation extended, and accepted: The hat cluster is a part of an outdoor art installation by the Brazilian artist Laura Lima, for the Boston Public Art Triennial, and her audience isn’t necessarily for the kind of living thing that sticks to the path.
Inside the nature center’s central hub, a visiting string quartet borrowed from the Boston Symphony Orchestra played for a small audience.
Affixed to a beam high above them in the center’s airy atrium hung another dense cluster of straw hats, inspired by – and looking much like – an outsize paper wasp’s nest. But you get the sense that for Lima, the true music is outdoors, in the rustle of leaves high above in the autumn breeze, in the call of birds, or in the stirring of unseen creatures in the undergrowth.
Lima, who works with nature organizations at home in Rio de Janeiro to both rehabilitate wildlife traumatized by the urban environment and to restore their habitats, spent time with wildlife experts here to tailor her work her to the needs of the preserve’s full-time residents, birds and squirrels among them.
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Along the pathways, clusters of objects come into view, at a safe remove: Small clay vessels – earthy birdhouses, maybe – dangle on hemp rope stretched between trees; bunches of straw hand brooms wrap the stout trunk of a tree at ground level, maybe offering the resident deer a luxurious scratch for their tick-ravaged haunches.
But even surrounded by forest, the constant thrum of traffic from the nearby American Legion Highway signals a simple fact: That the nature center is an island in a unnatural landscape long since transformed. Lima’s intervention serves practical purpose, but it’s more than simply humane (though it is surely that). Her work stands back from the path, behind signs warning you, human, to stay on the walkway where you belong. Observe from a safe distance. For once, this is not for you.
LAURA LIMA: INDISTINCT FORM (FORMA INDISTINTA)
Through Oct. 31. Boston Public Art Triennial at the Mass Audubon Boston Nature Center and Wildlife Sanctuary, 500 Walk Hill Street, Mattapan. 617-983-8500,
Murray Whyte can be reached at murray.whyte@globe.com. Follow him @TheMurrayWhyte.
