Kia ora. Welcome. My name is Rhona Orr.
I weave leaves. My art focuses on non-traditional weaving, finding beauty in leaves and celebrating resilience. What started as just woven leaf art (Leafiness) to be exhibited and sold has evolved into a project titled, The Resilient Leaf.
Leaf art for calming and connecting people in care
This project is based on evidence-based biophilic design and focuses on the use of leaf art as a non-pharmaceutical tool designed to support patients in care, especially those with compromised brain health such as dementia.
The Resilient Leaf project is a personal, independent research project born from a desire to make clinical and care spaces feel more supportive and calm. I do not have a team or any funding—just a dedicated framework ready for real-world testing.
Can personally selected leaf art help to ground individuals, reduce anxiety, and support natural sleep-wake cycles in clinical and aged care environments?
While environmental psychology widely supports the benefits of nature viewing, the Resilient Leaf project is a new concept combining many published papers. The Resilient Leaf project bridges simplicity with foveal interest, calming greens and eye-catching colors, white space to rest the eye, and weathered, scarred leaves to embrace resilient lives.
Bridging creative botanical art with established neuro-aesthetic and arts-in-health principles to test distinct types of supportive visual installations:
Patient-centred anchoring: To help center and ground an individual, this hypothesis introduces Leaf Art chosen by the resident for their own bedroom. It is mounted specifically at seating height to create an accessible, comforting, and highly personal visual anchor that supports daily dignity and cognitive centering. Once installed on the wall, these portraits are strictly stationary to maintain a reliable sense of spatial constancy.
Circadian Leaf Art: To support natural sleep-wake cycles, this hypothesis introduces larger, common-area installations integrated with dynamic circadian lighting. By shifting from stimulating daytime wavelengths to warm, gentle evening tones, I want to explore whether viewing Leaf Art combined with bio-adaptive light can help regulate sleep patterns and ease sundowning anxiety.
Spatial orientation & way-finding: Exploring whether distinct, large Leaf Art can act as intuitive landmarks, helping patients orient themselves naturally without relying solely on clinical signs.
Because visual safety and peace of mind are incredibly important in memory care and high-anxiety environments, every single leaf artwork undergoes a strict, manual triple-gate pareidolia check. This process screens out natural patterns that the brain might mistakenly organise into unintended, stressful 'eyes or faces.'
My Dad lives in a care facility as he has vascular dementia. His strong preference for my green leaf art, rather than yellow, orange, or red leaves, was the catalyst for me to research why. My Dad's friends in the care facility also preferred the green Leaf Art and feedback from buyers of my art highlighted a profound calming effect when viewing my art—a sentiment that mirrors my own meditative state when I weave leaves. Again, why?
While my background is in intelligence, analysis, data, and design rather than formal academia, I have used my skills and AI to determine why some leaf art is good and some is not. Using existing published research—spanning nature-view stress recovery, cortisol regulation, and the WHO guidelines for arts in health—I have moved away from creating random ‘pretty art’ in various sizes.
The Resilient Leaf project aims to transform care environments into spaces that honour the dignity, agency, and history of the people living within them by installing art that lowers stress and regulates the nervous system through evidence-based biophilic design. I have created a structured, evidence-based process for selecting art is safe for my dad and others. This repeatable, data-driven framework operationalising the 10 Principles of Dementia-Enabling Design into a repeatable, data-driven process, ensuring every piece of Leaf Art: Reduces risk and stimulation; Provides human scale and visibility; Optimizes helpful stimulation; Supports movement and engagement; Creates links to identity and community.
I am proud to have received positive feedback and encouragement on The Resilient Leaf project from pioneering environmental dementia experts Professor Richard Fleming, Kirsty Bennett, and Dr Joanna Sun. "Kirsty, Jo and I have looked at your materials with great interest and wish to encourage you to continue exploring how your art can assist people living with dementia... We can only encourage you to keep on with your interesting work which has value irrespective of its links with the Dignity Manifesto principle.." Professor Fleming.
As I learn more about the research this project is based on, I am sharing this knowledge with others via the Instagram clips shown below. Click on the images.
May 2026: Supportive feedback received from leading dementia environmental experts.
March 2026: Dad and I teamed up and entered a group exhibition showing my woven art and his poetry about leaves and living with dementia.
2025: This win resulted in a solo exhibition.
Leafiness — living shapes us all
What might be dismissed as an imperfect leaf is re-contextualised as a visual story of adaptability and endurance. A leaf shows all its experiences: nibbled by insects, ripped by the wind, torn by trimmers, shaded from the sun, or exposed to the elements. In response, leaves adapt and transform into unique shapes, textures and colours. Leaves persevere through these experiences. This visual, honest expression of how life experiences alter leaves fascinates the artist, Rhona. As she collects leaves, she is drawn to those that, like many of us, have lived complex, sometimes traumatic lives, capturing the leaves' adaptability and vibrancy before they fade, and celebrating the endurance and interconnectedness of all life.
2024: Winner of best newcomer at the Friends of Pātaka competition, Porirua.