I wanted this time to remove my hand from the image, and to then play with the objects on their own merit. As I worked, I noticed that the lack of natural (ie. biological) form was seriously detracting from the beauty of the images, so I went outside, grabbed some magnolia leaves and an azalea, and placed them on the scanner bed. This, and the addition of the shreds of photographs, reintroduced the biological to the image and balanced the hard edges of the machine made found objects. The titles came from a sentence I read in Neverwhere by Neil Gaimon: "He had gone beyond the world of metaphor and simile into a place of things that are and it was changing him."

Simile is the image on the left, and Metaphor is the image on the right. Simile was sold at a charity auction for Theater Winter Haven at a ridiculously low price (the auctioneer started the bidding well below what I had specified as the value), and although I wrote down who purchased the piece, I have misplaced that information. Metaphor is currently hanging in my mother's office.