Objects in a Stream

Florence Ledding Library, Milwaukie, Oregon
2019
Reclaimed beech, hand-carved yellow cedar, cast glass, etched glass, blown glass, wire, mirror, ceramic, cast metal, woven grass (14 objects and artworks)
110" x 272" x 32"
Commissioned by the Milwaukie Arts Commission

Objects in a Stream is an architecturally integrated wall that divides the adult and children's sides of the Ledding Library. Made in collaboration with Hacker Architects, it pairs with Under a Sky Spread with Light in the children's story time room. The wall is clad in wood reclaimed from a beloved local beech tree, and it includes a child-sized entry and exit door.

Fourteen angled and rectangular soundproof windows pass through the wall, their frames standing two inches proud of the surface on each side. Each internally lit pass-through holds a handmade object or artwork gathered, conceived, and made through community engagement: a building model, camas flowers, an abalone shell, a giant Bing cherry, material from the city archives. Light and sightlines travel between the two sides of the library while the boundary holds. Rather than tell one story, the wall offers a series of small encounters that visitors take at their own pace, and together they tie the library to Milwaukie's history while looking toward a hopeful future.

Several of the works were made by members of the Clackamas people, on whose ancestral homelands the library stands. We commissioned them in collaboration with the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, and tribal members chose the objects they felt connected most closely to the site: a child's fishing hat and a yellow cedar mat creaser, made by local Indigenous artists and given the same visual weight as everything else in the wall.