Laura Lima | Communal Nests for Windows, Balconies, Verandas, Gardens, and Forests

The work of Brazilian artist Laura Lima has always been deeply concerned with living things, with the vibration, unpredictability, and ongoing transformation of animate matter. Across three decades, her practice has traced the thresholds between bodies, creatures, environments, and the forces that shape them. Communal Nests for Windows, Balconies, Verandas, Gardens, and Forests presented at Goodman Gallery London is a powerful continuation of that. The exhibition will coincide with The Drawing Drawing at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, both forming her debut solo presentations in the city of London. 

Much of Lima’s approach stems from her background in philosophy and her formative art studies at the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage; her work often defying categorisations that those in the global art industry commonly reach for. She does not make “series” of work – all her artworks are somehow organically connected. She is resistant to the phrase “performance art”, but is rather inspired by the pivotal Brazilian Neo-Concretism of Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, and Hélio Oiticica, who viewed performance as a flexible version of sculpture. Lima forms a crucial part of this long history in Brazil of art being participatory, bodily, and multi-sensorial. This sensibility first took shape in works such as Vaca (H=c/M=c) (1994), when Lima led a cow onto Ipanema Beach, and Fuga (Escape), where birds were released inside a gallery space to rediscover flight. In other works, she has invited cats to explore installations before public opening, and preserved meals for a future dinner decades later. She uses plant-based dyes whose pigments shift and metabolise over time, as she did in the exhibition How to Eat the Sun and the Moon (Goodman Gallery Johannesburg, 2023). 

Some of these works appear here, and, at the heart of the exhibition is a large group of interconnected Communal Nests, which, as the title suggests, are ideally to be situated close to or within Windows, Balconies, Verandas, Gardens, and Forests, although here they happen to be installed in a gallery. Lima transforms a deliberately neutral space into what she calls a garden, filled with “architectural-sculptures” offering a new kind of habitat for a variety of species – birds, squirrels, rodents and even their predators. The nests are made out of straw hats, sticks, adorned perches deliberately inviting interaction, and transformation. With the straw hats, she takes something designed for and by humans, and with a simple fold recreates it as a potential home for smaller creatures. “The works inhabit the space to be harvested by the public”, explains Lima, “like a garden that invades it naturally. Each piece is a florescence that maintains a relationship with the whole, forming one large communal nest made of many communal nests. When removed and taken to the places – a garden, a balcony –  they continue to offer shelter and use to other beings, like displaced flowers that continue to live in new environments.”

Much like she does with categorisation, Lima resists the often-perceived preciousness of art’s physicality. These are artworks one doesn’t need to be precious with. She invites those who acquire them to leave them outside, or, at the very least, close to an open window. Add fruit and water. Lead small animals to discover them, burrow in them and start to inhabit them. Document and observe their transformation. If something breaks, like one of the hats, replace it with another one. By proposing this all, not through illustration but rather playful recommendation, she not only challenges what we value, but also asks us to reimagine how to live with it. Her gestures, sometimes subtle, often radical and materially acute, reveal Lima’s ongoing interest in how living beings inhabit space, and how structures might be shaped with them rather than merely around them.

Her exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts could be by an entirely different artist, illustrating her versatility. The Drawing Drawing unfolds across the Upper and Lower Galleries, integrating sculpture, movement, live performers and public participation. At the heart of The Drawing Drawing is a new interactive sculptural installation of the same name which reimagines the traditional framework of the life drawing class. It also features a well-known work by the artist: Ascenseur (2013/2016) in which a human arm reaches from underneath a wall, a set of keys just out of reach. In one small gesture, she opens up a world of possibilities.