What began as a simple gesture has grown into one of the most playful, communal features in our gallery: the rock stacking table. Years ago, we carried home a small collection of smooth stones from the coast of Maine. They had been tumbled by the sea, weathered by time, and felt like little treasures worth sharing. We placed them in the gallery, and without planning it, visitors began stacking them into cairns—miniature towers balanced carefully stone by stone.
Since then, the table has taken on a life of its own. Travelers, friends, and artists have all brought rocks from their corners of the world to add to the collection. Today, the table is a colorful and varied landscape of granite, quartz, river stones, and fossils—each rock carrying its own story, geography, and memory. It’s become a place where people pause, play, and create something impermanent but beautiful.
The act of stacking stones is as old as humanity itself. Cairns—those deliberate piles of rocks—have been used across cultures and centuries as trail markers, memorials, spiritual offerings, or simple symbols of balance and presence. Whether they were guiding travelers through rugged terrain, honoring ancestors, or marking a sacred place, cairns connect us to a long history of meaning-making with the most basic material: stone.
Here, though, cairn building is less about direction and more about delight. Visitors of all ages gather around the table to try their hand at balancing impossible towers, sometimes toppling them with laughter, other times creating precarious sculptures that seem to defy gravity. It’s a reminder that art doesn’t always have to be permanent or framed—it can be as simple as a few moments of balance between you, a stone, and the space it inhabits.
So next time you visit, take a moment at the rock stacking table. Add a stone from your travels if you’d like, or just see how tall a tower you can build. Who knows—your cairn may stand for only a few minutes, but it will join a much longer story of rocks, hands, and the joy of creating something together. CLICK HERE to see all the fun interactive things in the gallery.
