The day is young,  the sun is hot and the artist Zach Gilliland is going to the beach. With a degree in ceramics that he hasn’t touched in a decade, and burned out with his woodworking, he slathers on the sunscreen with full intention to try his hand at sand. A master sand sculptor offered to show him the ropes and Gilliland has big plans—a giant octopus with writhing tentacles that he sketched the night before. Unfortunately, Gilliland also has no idea what he’s doing. Upon discovering Gilliland’s miscalculation, his friend counters with a compromise. “Here’s a pile of sand,” he says. “Do a brain coral.” Gilliland tries—and fails—for hours, again and again, the gritty medium refusing to yield those signature squiggles to any satisfaction. “It drove me nuts,” Gilliland says, and for months after he would catch himself drawing coral-like shapes when his mind wandered. 

Photo by Wyatt Kostygan.

PHOTO BY WYATT KOSTYGAN.

At New College of Florida, Gilliland falls in love with steel. A technician in the shop department, he maintains and repairs dangerous equipment to forestall any potential classroom accidents. On this particular day, that means making sure the plasma cutter designed to slice through six inches of steel with superheated ionized gas doesn’t slice through six inches of student instead. Testing his repairs, Gilliland mounts a sheet of steel, sparks up the plasma cutter and begins to freehand across the surface. The steel melts like butter and Gilliland can’t stop. He’s addicted, and two hours slip by unnoticed before a supervisor interrupts. “What the hell are you doing?” he says. Scattered all around Gilliland’s feet lie countless, carven coral shapes.

Photo by Wyatt Kostygan.

PHOTO BY WYATT KOSTYGAN.

Gilliland doesn’t stop. It becomes something of a morning ritual—a bit of metallic meditation or mental stretch to start the day. “Brain Games” he calls it, cutting out his spindly shapes and then fitting them together like a jigsaw puzzle with no guidance beyond his own artistic intuition. But soon that’s not enough. He starts painting less and carving more, getting lost in the endless curves that wind and coil like grasping filaments. He acquires a studio space off Princeton Drive, where he can install his own plasma cutter and sculpt into the night. And as he does, he starts remembering his childhood, which wouldn’t be such a big deal to some, but Gilliland doesn’t remember so much these days.

“We kind of lost track of head injuries when I was a kid,” Gilliland says, but between soccer, street hockey and cycling he knows he amassed at least 14 concussions before the age of 12. As a result, gaps appear in his memory and new ones may not stick so well, but working the steel seems to bring them back. What once appeared as coral begins to look more like neurons, and Gilliland’s sculptures like reassembled recollections memorialized in metalwork. “It’s kind of been my little therapy session for a few years,” he says. “This is the first time I’m able to see my brain and get comfortable with the mess that’s in there.”