Had the gallery director not told me that the clear glass vase filled with dirt is home to 14 earthworms and that the sometimes sprawling, sometimes refined, and invariably energetic abstract images that fill the gallery reflect the artist’s preoccupation with the creatures, I wouldn’t have known. No matter. Spiraling charcoal-black forms abound, rarely reminiscent of earthworms; they appear to be moving at a tremendous velocity and rarely come to an end. A tangle of what look like cornucopias, ribbed hoses, fungi, and intestines occupy an entire wall where different-sized sheets of paper fit together to become an erratic collage. If these are earthworms, they’re on amphetamines. Some writhe, others encircle each other, loop, squeeze, snake, and stretch in a bizarre drama of subterranean drive, a living magma in which everything connects and no strand can be followed.

Ainslie’s compositional sense is astute; she applies color with spare precision. On the left side of the gigantic, visceral hodge-podge called Crawlers 3, mustard yellow runs through the shifting forms, but only down the middle of the mountainous debris. On the right side (the work almost qualifies as a diptych, with its two distinct masses joined by a pair of dark, thick chutes), a rich brown glazes a heart-shaped area in the upper reaches of the complementary heap. Yet for all the mysteriousness and unpredictability of her imagery, she achieves a balance beyond the mere application of color. The left half of Crawlers 3 is essentially vertical and pulls leftward, an uneven pyramid that appears to rise from a tapering, distant tail. The right half, denser and less given to contrast, is more horizontally shaped and tugs in the opposite direction. Turmoil, confusion, entanglement, the indecipherability of organic matter — all contribute to the artist’s vision. And though the monumental compactness of her images couldn’t be called playful (play requires air), the energy of her shapes also precludes somberness or foreboding.

Not all of “Crawlers” boasts the explosive, almost lewd edginess of Crawlers 3. In two groups that go by the title Nightcrawlers, the coils are elongated but, with one exception, significantly reduced in number, and their rippling black bands belong to unpopulated background washes of muted color, gray blue or maple brown. They’re like imaginary landscapes. In most of Nightcrawlers, the cylindrical forms appear large in the foreground and diminish in size in the upper half of the picture plane with resulting intimations of perspective, a zany takeoff on ancient Chinese scroll painting, vistas of muted hues punctuated by precise, recurrent silhouettes. The mood is meditative, vaguely celebratory. Given greater space, Ainslie’s ostensible worms become the land itself, wiry drumlins, slowed down in speed to the pace of the earth.

Ainslie brings balance to tumult. The landscapes are never placid, even at their most austere; movement governs all. In one of the Nightcrawlers, huge, interminable coils look as if they’d been stopped by a pane of glass inches from your face; they nearly blot out the land or air behind and beneath them, riotous in their squirming muscularity. Other elements allow for pause, particularly the small, open space just to the right of center that frames another, smaller open space that might be the mouth of a rising worm. The creature could be coming up for a breath, a second of stillness in the surrounding madness that the artist may be saying is the only respite worms, or those of us they ultimately feed on, ever really get.

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On the surface, nothing could be further from “Crawlers” than the seven movement-sensitive robotic steel-and-wood machines, each eight feet tall and 12 feet wide, that make up “Tipping Point,” the ambitious, collaborative show at the Boston Center for the Arts’ Mills Gallery. Yet each exhibit tests the boundaries of one formally defined theme. A team comprising an academic social anthropologist (Ellen Ginsburg) and three computer-savvy, mechanically adept artists (project leader Jennifer Hall, robotics guru Blyth Hazen, and software programmer Arnaldo Hernandez) set out to discover and then translate the “tipping points” in the lives of seven South End artists.