Patterns gone awry and aright and all over the wall

....and what's wrong with this picture?
Earlier in the week I was working out the top half of the robe pattern, trying a couple of different versions of sleeves,  and basted one on upside down.  I immediately thought of having to hold my arm over my head all the time just to wear the robe, then I started thinking about how we try so hard to change our bodies to fit fashion, and then I wandered way off track into Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities" territory and  imagined a city of people whose bodies have mutated to accommodate the shoddiness of the garment industry.
That was about as far down that path as I cared to wander.

... paths, brains, wandering ...here is a diagram of the map our brain makes to locate ourselves in space-- for example, to remember where your car is in a parking lot.



Here's Neil Burgess explaining the idea in this TED talk 

Here is how is how we span space in steel.  Looks familiar. The structure itself is a construction of the force diagram as it appears in a physics book.

...close enough, anyway.  The point is that the same pattern that holds up the physical world around us is also inside of us, tracking where we are and where we've been.

This is an example of  a typical Islamic decorative motif.  Our aesthetic preference for complex triangulated geometry looks an awful lot like what our brain is doing when we're making a mental note of where the car is parked. Amazing.

Connections-- ancient sounds and language

                        This morning, as I was listening to the birds, I kept thinking about Oliver Sacks' ideas in the previous post --- that we as humans are connected to nature through geometric patterns.  I thought about the bird sounds being patterns, structured through rhythm and repetition, and how they bring me a sense of not just familiarity, but also of completion, of wholeness.

I wonder if the sound patterns, like geometric patterns are inside of us, if the vocalization of the birds is stored as auditory patterns somewhere in our evolutionary DNA, if bird calls are as much a part of who we are as a snowflake.


I was thinking of Clyde Connell's series of Swamp Song drawings in which she recorded the sounds of the bayou by making thousands of spontaneously generated marks, effectively creating her own written language as she listened to birds and other swamp sounds.

Like Connell, I grew up in Lousiana; when I was very young we lived in the southernmost part of the state where the distinction between what is land and what is water is never completely clear.  Here are some of my  sister's old photos from a notebook she made during the time we lived near Bayou Teche.

Bayous, birds, ancient sound, evolution-- the word that comes to mind is...

at·a·vism
 noun \ˈa-tə-ˌvi-zəm\

Definition of ATAVISM

1

a : recurrence in an organism of a trait or character typical of an ancestral form and usually due to genetic recombination

b : recurrence of or reversion to a past style, manner, outlook, approach, or activity atavism

Origin of ATAVISM

French atavisme, from Latin atavus ancestor, from at-(probably akin to atta daddy) + avus grandfather — more atuncle

First Known Use: 1833

Oliver Sacks and "Hallucinations"

"Do the arabesques and hexagons, in our own minds, built into our brain organization, provide us with the first intimations of formal beauty?"


- Oliver Sacks, from his book "Hallucinations".   The quote references the geometric hallucinations that sometimes precede migraine headaches.  He points to this being a universal phenomenom, occurring in humans of all cultures, ages (Sacks himself experienced them as a three-year-old) and throughout history, one that connects us directly to nature through patterns-- an example being snowflakes.



"In this sense the geometrical hallucinations of migraine allow us to experience in ourselves not only a universal of neural functioning but a universal of nature itself."


- "Migraine-like patterns, indeed, can be found in Islamic art..."

"... in Zapotec architecture..."








"... Aboriginal artists in Australia..."




"..in Acoma pottery..."




"... in Swazi basketry..."

Reminds me of..

Last week, after I did this bird drawing, I thought  

"She reminds me of someone".

Yesterday Vermeer's "Girl with Pearl Earring" came to mind--  the similarity being the long shape on the right, as well as the positioning of the subject in the frame. The gazes and facial expressions are completely different. 

I've been thinking a lot about how our brains respond to shapes and pattern, as opposed to reading emotions and facial recognition. Both are basic survival skills-- shapes and movement for identifying predators or prey,  and facial expressions for detecting potential threats or aggression.

John Gould: Blue Pitta. Early 19th c.

The bird prints, for me, evoke both responses.  I have a strong visceral reaction to the shapes, colors, and high-contrast patterns; at the same time, I'm projecting myself into the emotional life of the creature, what is it thinking, how is it feeling.  It's the simultaneity of these responses, the sense that I am suspended between  two primitive, but very different reactive states, that engages me and gives me a great deal of pleasure as well.

Redbud leaves-- not so green

.....thinking about nature color, shapes, and shadows, here are several color variations of the same photo of redbud leaves which show different intensities of contrasts between the black shadows and the color. I love the layering of the leaves in this photos, which simultaneously conveys both flatness and depth.  I also like the delicacy of the black stem contrasted with the large, solid shapes of the shadows.  I can imagine this image in different colored  silks...

Vintage fabrics

Fabrics from a couple of well worn 1930's-40's quilts made by my grandmother or great aunt. I like to think about where the scraps came from-- what garments were made with the fabric. I can easily see using the small green geometric print for a 1940's dress like the McCall's pattern below.