November Creative Residents Taha Ebrahimi and Allison Kudla Workshop

Maps have long been used to shape dominant perspectives of places, spaces and people. By design, maps also discount the intangibles of lived experience and biases in the practice of cartography and data collection itself. Participants will be provided a hand-drawn map and a leaf collection bag, inviting them to take a break from their digital world to embrace an analog, inexact approach to finding and identifying specific trees at the Bloedel Reserve.

The fallen leaves collected by participants will then be used as the material for a companion piece created by Allison Kudla. She will share a method that intersects computer-aided design, laser cutting and traditional leaf preservation techniques to create a collective representation of the algorithmic design of leaf venation patterns from the collected leaves. Each journey becomes the material of the work, challenging the notion of uniform representations of time and experience.