Leafy Landscapes: Artist Reshapes Autumn Leaves into Mazes, Circles & Suns

Famously beautiful ginkgo trees provide the raw materials for this falling leaf artist, which are carefully raked to create site-specific, all-natural art on the campus of Sacramento State University.

Joanna Hedrick works at the school and has made these creations a kind of annual tradition,providing a backdrop for photos and a unique series of installation artworks for students — a great distraction right around finals time.

Using rakes, the artist creates complex maze, honeycomb, sunshine and other shapes, generally around a half-dozen per year. The idea is simple: take something already in place, then rearrange it to make something fun, interesting and a little different. Naturally, these works are eventually blown back into more abstract configurations, but that unraveling can be fascinating to watch, too.