Ingrid Lahti’s stacked stones, located at South 15th and Commerce streets, commemorate a Buddhist temple that was near this location in the early 1900s. (Photos by brooks seymore)
Dear Readers: This is an ongoing series of articles paying tribute to Tacoma’s public art works that often go missed by busy commuters passing through and even locals who walk past these monuments every day but never stop to appreciate them. Enjoy!
Each of the five stops along the Tacoma Link light rail system – which runs between the Dome District and Theater District – features its own distinct works of art that make reference to the part of town in which it is located.
Tacoma Dome Station, for example, (see “Know your public art” featured the March 25, 2010 edition of Tacoma Weekly) incorporates design features that reference Tacoma’s railroading history.
In her 2003 commission for the Convention Center station (located just north and kitty corner to the Convention Center at South 15th and Commerce streets), area artist Ingrid Lahti devised a set of five structures in which stacks of stones (she refers to them as “cairns”) are held together by stainless steel frameworks. These stone cairns are a reference to the presence of an early Buddhist temple that was once located near the present day site of the light rail stop. Stacked stones are also used as trail markers in the wilderness and are thus an appropriate symbol for those who follow the “trail” of the light rail.
In the early 20th century, Tacoma’s Buddhist community formed a temple one block away inside the Columbus Hotel at 1556 Market Street. In 1929 the community acquired property along Fawcett Street and built the Tacoma Buddhist Temple, which continues to serve its function to this day.
Lahti’s cairns manage to kill two birds with one stone (so to speak). The stacks of loaf-sized river stones are a convenient stand-in for the Buddhism that Lahti seeks to commemorate. The stacking of stones – as cairns and oboes – has a long tradition in various Buddhist cultures, though such constructions are by no means limited to regions where Buddhism has held sway. Cairns can serve as memorials to the departed, as indicators of spiritual places or as markers of a trail. The use of stones is also part of Lahti’s modus operandi: she has used river stones and a wide array of other “found” materials in her numerous installations and public works of art.
The five cairns that Lahti constructed for Sound Transit’s Convention Center Station are set amid a geometry of beveled, concrete blocks and planters along the back side of the station’s glass awning (the glass work was done by Fernanda D’Agostino in reference to Tacoma as a Mecca of studio glass movement).
The cairns range from but a few feet in height to one that towers far above the viewer’s head: a pillar of rounded, irregular, natural stones stacked one upon another held forever in place by the rigid framework of steel. The effect is of something that is both artificial and naturalistic. The Zen-like stone columns in their stainless steel straightjackets echo both the towering buildings of downtown and the plantings of trees and ornamental grass of the rail station.
Such contradiction is also a hallmark of Lahti’s work. In the past, for example, she did a series of neon signs that gave contradictory commands such as “come here/GO AWAY.” Other installations have explored contrasts such as wet versus dry, and heavy versus light.
Lahti is not unfamiliar to Tacoma audiences. Her 1999 “DO NOT/REMEMBER” was exhibited at the gone but not forgotten Commencement Gallery and in 2002 she displayed neon signage in the Cosmopolitan Building storefront windows. Lahti’s 2005 “Squeeze” installation at Barefoot Dance Studio invited visitors to experience the sensation of being squeezed by a neoprene structure.
Originally schooled in the sciences (she was a graduate student in microbiology at Yale in the 1970s), Lahti went on to study art, attending Cornish College of Arts and earning her master of fine art degree from University of Washington in 1990. Prone to the production of rather cerebral, experience-based work, Lahti currently resides on Mercer Island.
Lahti asserts that the “ancient stones enclosed in contemporary stainless steel embody the balance and the tension between tradition and innovation seen everywhere in the evolving Tacoma cityscape.” Her five marvelous cairns link the past and present and mark the way to the future.
For further information on Lahti visit www.ingridlahti.com.
Contact the writer at dave@tacomaweekly.com.
