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Oak Herbarium: An Artistic Record

$155.00

Sunday October 26
10:00 am - 4:00 pm

Instructors: Emma Rooney & Erin MacKeen

Materials Fee: $20 (paid directly to the Instructors)
Students: 10

If you’ve ever collected autumn leaves or tucked acorns into your pocket, this workshop reimagines herbarium collection as a dynamic creative practice.

This is an opportunity to build your own artistic record of the iconic oaks. We’ll observe and explore how these trees inspire and provide materials for creative practice in the urban landscape during late October.

We’ll begin outdoors with a short guided forest bathing walk, meeting neighbourhood trees more intimately through our senses. Along the way, we’ll consider ethical foraging for dye materials and practices that people across times and cultures have used to deepen relationships with oak trees and document their presence.

Returning to the studio, we’ll experiment with making colour from acorns for painting, printing on fabric, and ink. With the curiosity of an amateur naturalist, we’ll record what we notice in sketches, colour swatches, monoprints, and notes. For context, we’ll also demonstrate traditional herbarium documentation — pressing, storing, and labeling plant material — and share a few simple naturalist skills before returning to our creative focus.

As foraging can be unpredictable, plant matter will be provided by the instructors. Please bring a sketchbook and any materials you like to use. Dress to go outside and keep dry in the event of rain.

Sunday October 26
10:00 am - 4:00 pm

Instructors: Emma Rooney & Erin MacKeen

Materials Fee: $20 (paid directly to the Instructors)
Students: 10

If you’ve ever collected autumn leaves or tucked acorns into your pocket, this workshop reimagines herbarium collection as a dynamic creative practice.

This is an opportunity to build your own artistic record of the iconic oaks. We’ll observe and explore how these trees inspire and provide materials for creative practice in the urban landscape during late October.

We’ll begin outdoors with a short guided forest bathing walk, meeting neighbourhood trees more intimately through our senses. Along the way, we’ll consider ethical foraging for dye materials and practices that people across times and cultures have used to deepen relationships with oak trees and document their presence.

Returning to the studio, we’ll experiment with making colour from acorns for painting, printing on fabric, and ink. With the curiosity of an amateur naturalist, we’ll record what we notice in sketches, colour swatches, monoprints, and notes. For context, we’ll also demonstrate traditional herbarium documentation — pressing, storing, and labeling plant material — and share a few simple naturalist skills before returning to our creative focus.

As foraging can be unpredictable, plant matter will be provided by the instructors. Please bring a sketchbook and any materials you like to use. Dress to go outside and keep dry in the event of rain.

Erin MacKeen is an artist, designer, and professional tarot reader who’s integrated practice is an exploration of care: how we collectively tend to each other, become better resourced, share tools for self-discovery, and cultivate the safety and support needed to be our authentic selves.

Using digital illustration and natural specimens for image-making, Erin’s work is screen printed on textiles as a foundational pattern for further handwork such as embroidery and beading. These works are both decorative and “useable” objects that explore ideas of death, rest, and nature as a form of care. Erin is currently experimenting and researching natural dyeing, sculpture, and knitting as additional medias and practices in her work.

Emma Rooney is a nature and forest therapy guide, horticultural therapy practitioner, and community programmer whose work explores connection with nature across the lifespan. Based in Toronto’s High Park, she is rooted in the Black Oak Savannah, a rare and threatened landscape that continues to shape her creative path in the city.

Her approach places equal value on caring for the land and caring for people, inviting others to notice the extraordinary in nearby nature, celebrate connection to the living world, and build interspecies community. Through nature journaling and seed collecting practices, Emma tracks the turning seasons and teaches others to do the same. Holding a fallen acorn brings grounding, and “going to seed” becomes a vision of continuity and renewal.