An eco-art installation that's for the birds — literally

Each May, a chirpy flock of songbirds returns to Appleton Farms in Ipswich. The declining, migratory bobolinks settle in there to mate and hide their nests in the historic property’s grassy fields. But when they arrive this year, the bobolinks will become the stars of a pastoral art installation called “Perch.” It’s debuting during Earth Week, and, as I found out on a farm visit earlier this month, the project is — literally — for the birds.

With airplanes, azure sky and puffy, white clouds overhead — artist Jean Shin was hammering shiny nails through a copper cut-out laid flat on the surface of a dissected, decomposing tree trunk. “One down, a hundred more to go,” Shin said, laughing.

Repurposed wood is Shin's material of choice for this sprawling, site-specific series of sculptures. When the New York artist won this Art and The Landscape commission with guest curator Jessica Hong four years ago, Shin was already intrigued by farms. She said they can illuminate urgent environmental issues including land use, food equity, sustainable agriculture and biodiversity. But the artist and curator needed to find a narrative for this project.

Then, through extensive interviews and tours with Appleton’s team, they learned about this farm’s critical role as an annual refuge for its avian visitors: the bobolinks. “I knew nothing about these beautiful birds,” Shin recalled.

The tawny female and black, yellow-capped male bobolinks became Shin’s muses. She set out to amplify the vulnerable birds’ reliance on perching at Appleton to survive.

“Their populations are really dependent on farmers and their hay fields, their pastures — and grasslands are declining all over the world,” Shin said. “So, it just seemed like the most beautiful story for us to understand more deeply and really appreciate their contribution to the landscape.”

For Shin, this vulnerable little bird also tells an urgent tale about migration and displacement. “That, of course, links to climate change,” she said, “we’re all having to be displaced in some way.”

Hong, senior modern and contemporary art curator at the Toledo Museum of Art, said of Shin's art: “All of her works are so deeply connected to the land. There’s this deep sensitivity to the histories and communities embedded within the landscape.”

Shin, who was born in Korea, is known for excavating ideas and questions through the process of transforming unwanted objects into art. Her work has filled galleries at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. and San Francisco's Asian Art Museum.

As they developed the project, Hong said she and Shin dove into Appleton’s history. “I think what was so fascinating to us was that this is the longest-running farm in the United States,” said Hong, “but we also realized the critical characters were the bobolinks.”

Appleton has been a working farm that's been stewarding the land since 1638. Today, its agriculture and ecology teams balance their practices — including cattle grazing and hay production — with the visiting bobolinks’ lifecycle. Standing in Appleton’s meadow, agroecologist Alejandro Brambila explained why these little songbirds matter.

“When we have a field that has bobolinks in it, it means that we have a relatively well-functioning grassland ecosystem,” he said, “and that comes along with all the flowering species that are there, insects that are there, and other species that comprise the whole community of that field.”

When the bobolinks arrive from the southern hemisphere in May, Brambila said they’ll zip around their temporary home — perching, mating and hunting for insects to feed their young. The birds' R2D2-like songs will become something of a soundtrack for summer in the fields.

In 2010, The Trustees — a nonprofit that oversees Appleton Farms and more than 100 properties across Massachusetts — launched a volunteer monitoring program to count and collect data on the migrant bobolinks. “Grassland birds, in general, have been in decline for quite a few decades now, and they're sensitive,” Brambilla said. "They need a specific amount of acreage, they need to be a certain distance away from trees.”

He is thrilled Shin’s project will highlight the birds’ ecologically complex habitat. “It’s hard to just kind of stand out and look at a field of grass and translate that,” he said.

To make the hidden relationship more visible, Shin fashioned 18 sculptures that dot the swath of fields where the bobolinks will perch. “Usually they would do that on top of the tall grass reeds,” she said, “and so these function for them to say, 'yeah, here's your stage. Perch here.'”

To make the perches, Shin adorned rotted, wooden fence rails that used to enclose farm animals. “When I saw them, I was just struck by their beauty,” she said. “All the lichen and moss had grown over them, so I decided to bring them to my studio.”

Shin adorned the cast-offs with weathered copper salvaged from the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum (another Trustees property) and pruned chestnut branches. Now her creations stick up vertically from the earth, like ghostly little franken-trees. “I’ve never made sculpture just for the birds,” Shin said with a smile.

But, the birds aren’t the only creatures invited to perch at Appleton. Shin also made viewing platforms out of dead trees so human visitors can have a bird's eye view that connects them to nature. “What's changing here in the landscape if we slow down, if we decide to perch … like a bird?” she asked. “We get to literally observe our environment more closely. So the hope is that we can really have bobolinks survive and thrive, and that will keep the ecosystem in check.”

Hong, the project’s curator, added, “We’re foregrounding the bobolinks, but it’s also thinking about our inter-species relationships, and that we’re part of the natural world. Now people will come here to hike, pick up their CSAs or go to a camp and they’ll encounter these incredible works.” Hong and Shin hope the installation inspires curiosity, reflection and action.

But, you might be wondering if the bobolinks will be game to participate in this art installation.

“I’ve been promised they’ll perch on pretty much anything,” Shin said. “If they see a line, a cable, certainly fences, they’ll perch. So we will wait and see for their arrival.”

“Perch” is on view at Appleton Farms through Nov. 1.