The signs appeared all over the Island last weekend and caught residents by surprise. One sits on the hill west of the Tashmoo overlook, with gnarled and bent trees in the background and to the right a green sward rolling to a glimpse of the lake. It is a crisp white sign with the words, “Look how much I adore you.” From a distance, it appears as a sharp rectangular shape imposed on the undulating natural forms all around. What to make of it? Who put it up — and why?

The signs were created by Julia Kidd, a psychotherapist and artist who lives in West Tisbury. She said the project took two years to become a reality, including working with private landowners and towns to allow the signs to go to go up. Her title for the project is “I got all your messages and loved every one.”

The signs will stay up until May 7.

Perhaps ironically, as her project went up in highly visible places around the Island this week, Ms. Kidd tried to stay out of the limelight. In an e-mail to the Gazette she said the work represents a departure from the projects she did in both art and social work before moving here in 2001. “This project is the opposite of my earlier thinking,” she wrote. “Previous work pointed out problems. This is about what is right in the world. It is about noticing and focusing on the beauty, the gifts and the love that is available to us. It is about caring for ourselves, honoring ourselves and our surroundings and most importantly recognizing each of us is loved and lovable.”

She also said: “For the most part people seem to get the message. People have been writing me and posting on Facebook how happy the signs make them feel. One person mentioned the signs were discussed in the Chilmark School morning meeting. That, for me, is a dream come true. “

There was plenty of reaction to the project.

Tom Dresser, an Island author and tour bus guide, pulled into the overlook on Saturday just after the sign was put up. His bus was loaded with mostly British passengers from the cruise ship Balmoral making a transatlantic voyage to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. “I was enchanted with the sign. I had not seen it before,” he said. “There’s something new going on here, I told my passengers, and I don’t know what it is, which was a little unusual for a tour guide. I saw a police car parked there so I knew it was legal.”

In the parked patrol car just ahead of Tom’s bus, Tisbury police Sgt. Tim Stobie was having a similar reaction. “I scratched my head a few times trying to figure it out,” he said. “I was wondering who is the ‘I’ in the statement? It certainly was something different. Usually the only thing you see on that hill is sledders in winter. Art did not enter my head. I figured it had something to do with that field and the view.”

Mr. Dresser compared it to The Gates, the project done in Central Park in New York in 2005 by the artists Chrtisto and Jeanne-Claude.

Ms. Kidd’s sign at the Tashmoo overlook is one of 11 installations around the Island. There is one on the hull of the schooner Shenandoah (“It is so easy to love you”), another at ’Nip n’ Tuck Farm (“Nothing is perfect but you come close”), another at the Keith Farm in Chilmark (“I can’t get enough of you”), and at the Aquinnah Circle (“Oh what a treasure you are”). Others are at Morning Glory Farm, Main street Edgartown, the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School cafeteria, the West Tisbury Library, the marquee of the Island Theatre in Oak Bluffs, and as a projected slide on the screens of the Capawock Theatre and the Edgartown Cinema.

“There’s something about the fact that the type is so crisp,” said Nathan Shepard an Island carpenter and an artist. “The messages are positive but they look like newsprint, or a fortune cookie. It is art, it is language and it is about us and how we are treasures too.”

Tim Vitalis, a carpenter, enjoyed the mystery of it all. “I love the anonymity of this project,” he said. “It’s not your typical gallery opening with wine and speeches. These things just seemed to pop up mysteriously all over the Island.”

Duncan Schilcher and Lucia and Augusta Dillon were driving to the dumptique when they spotted the sign at Nip ’n’Tuck and they pulled over to look at it more closely.

“I thought someone was proposing to someone,” Duncan said. “That would be a great proposal.”

“They might follow the signs to Aquinnah and he would be there with a ring at the end,” Lucia said.

Jerry Fritz, the pastor of the Federated Church in Edgartown, was one of the first to see the banner over Main street just after it went up early Sunday morning. “I just returned from an eight-day mission trip to Black Rock, Arizona, that immersed us in Navajo culture,” he said. “They were the most loving and welcoming people you would want to meet. And I came home and I am driving down Main street and I see this banner. I like it. That’s what I try to tell everybody — my faith leads me to that.”

The signs will be up for only two weeks, partly for a practical reason — it was easier to get permission to put up a temporary installation — and more importantly because, as Ms. Kidd puts it: “I like the unexpected quality of it, people will come upon the signs as a surprise which adds to the mystery and after two weeks the surprise will have worn off.