The brain is mostly metaphor, even to itself. We do not perceive our neurons firing; we perceive the world they assemble for us. The cell that does the work: the dendrite reaching out, the axon carrying the signal, the synapse releasing its small chemical message into the gap, is invisible to the experience it makes possible. To see one, we have to build it at scale, in metal, and put it outside.

This photograph is a portrait of that translation. I made this photograph of the steel sculpture titled Neuron - branching dendrites of welded tubing reaching up into what, in the image, reads as pure void. The IR film simulation pushes the sky to absolute black and lifts the highlights on the metal, which has the effect of removing the sculpture from its surroundings entirely. There is no garden in this frame. There is the cell, and there is the space the cell exists in, which is the same darkness a real neuron lives in inside a skull.

What drew me was the welds. The artist did not try to hide them. Each segment of tubing is visibly joined to the next, the seam beaded across the curve like a scar, which keeps the sculpture honest about being a sculpture and not a diagram. A real neuron is a continuous biological thing. This one is fabricated, assembled, sectioned - closer to how we describe a neuron than to what one actually is. The metaphor stays a metaphor.

The wisps of cloud on the right side of the frame were not planned. They drifted through during the exposure and I kept them because they were there, and because they do something the rest of the image doesn't: they suggest motion, a discharge, the moment of a signal crossing a gap. They are just clouds. But the eye finds them, and once found they become part of what the image is doing.