Dendrites of Synesthesia

Before I knew what I was making, I knew what I was seeing. Dendrites of Synesthesia emerged from an obsession with looking upward — photographing tree canopies where branches refuse to touch, stacking moments of absence into a single density. What revealed itself was not a forest, but a system: branching like neurons, flowing like rivers, curving like continents seen from orbit. sitting at the fault line between scales — micro and macro collapse into one another. What could be read as satellite imagery is equally a cerebral map under psilocybin, or the vascular logic of life itself. The trees were never the subject; the pattern was. This artwork is important because it marks a milestone of my artistic trajectory — a time I recognized that perception itself has structure, and that nature and cognition share the same recursive language. Long before AI aesthetics, this piece arrived through accumulation, patience, and altered seeing. No synthesis, no generation — only attention. It is a record of the moment I understood that consciousness, ecosystems, and planets are variations of the same form — and that art could expose this continuity. Dendrites of Synesthesia by Nuwan Shilpa Hennayake