Portraits, poets, and patterns-- bird textile on 1920's bedspread

...le Grazie in lei diffuse e sparte...
-the Graces diffused and scattered in her...
- Anton Francesco Grazzini 

                  Laura Battiferri--by Bronzino, 1560.

Thinking of  portraits, poetry and poets.. this bird reminded me of the portrait of the poet Laura Battiferri   by Bronzino (also spelled "Battiferra"), even though the abstract, bumpy, quality of  my textile couldn't be more different than the refined perfection of Bronzino's painting.  It was the beak which brought to mind Battiferri's exquisite profile.  I've had portraits on my mind lately, as you can see in this photo of my studio floor taken a few weeks ago when I was first considering using my drawing to make a textile.

The poet Anton Francesco Grazzini wrote a poem  (-see p4) about Bronzino's painting of Laura Battiferra.

I was particularly struck by the line  "le Grazie in lei diffuse e sparte"  (the Graces diffused and scattered in her) and tried to use the worn threads of the bedspread to evoke the idea - interweaving the stitches in such a way so that they seem to hang in the threads. I would love to make something on a much larger scale that has large, loose threads, and perhaps shapes and text woven into them.

Responding to the pattern...

...I recalled this map our brain makes to remember where we parked our car in the parking lot.  The red dots mark the firing pattern of our brain cells on a triangular grid-- just goes to show that we are patterns at our most fundamental, functional level.  This coincides with an interest I have in how humans organize themselves organically, what systems are always running in the background or our lives.

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Thinking about the evolution of this textile calls to mind my own creative patterns,  how they unfold through associations and references, and are articulated in the physical realization of a work of art.
Maps, network, threads, imagination... each time I make something I am making a map, literally sewing up the diversity of ideas floating around in my head at any given time