Date of Award
Spring 5-22-2026
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Design (MDes) in Interior Studies / Exhibition + Narrative Environments
Department
Interior Architecture
First Advisor
Leeland Mcphail
Second Advisor
Susan Williams
Third Advisor
Adam Thabo
Abstract
The fallen leaf is a material figure of the unseen, forgotten moments that have made us and holds us still while remaining outside our sight. In urban environments, fallen leaves are managed as seasonal waste, collected and quickly separated from everyday encounter. Yet within ecological systems, they continue to participate in cycles of regeneration, becoming the soil that sustains new life. This quiet continuation is unavailable to the eye, yet known by the body. As a proof of this, the leaf’s transformation reveals itself not to the mind, but to the hand. The curling fiber wears out, the deepening brown, holds the scent of slow composting.
In the spatial installation, leaf-litter is not cleared but met, a place where the body can follow the leaf’s slow undoing and remember what the mind has not held. This is the premise of kinaesthetic knowing, an understanding that develops through bodily engagement rather than information alone. What memory cannot hold, what the mind does not notice, the body can. Through such encounters, a felt understanding of time emerges: one in which ending and continuation are not opposites but phases of one motion.
What we call litter, what we call ending, what we call absence — each is presence in another form. The leaf becomes soil, the soil becomes what comes next. The fallen leaf is proof of every presence that has shaped us, and that holds us still, even as it passes out of sight.
Recommended Citation
Cho, Juhee, "Fallen Leaves:The Unseen, Forgotten, Presences that Live in Us" (2026). Masters Theses. 1589.
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/masterstheses/1589
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Included in
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