Maze embroidery

As in my first embroidery, fly stitches represent neurons making synaptic connections in the maze. The finished work is a meditation on learning and memory.

As a teenager I read Daniel Keyes' novel Flowers for Algernon, and that charming story has been part of the inspiration for this embroidery. The eponymous Algernon is a mouse whose intelligence is raised by some not-clearly-explained means, following which the experiment is tried on Charlie, an adult human. The book is written as Charlie's journal of the process as his intelligence is raised from well below average to far above that of the scientists doing the experiment:

Burt says PSYCHOLOGY means minds and LABORATORY meens a place where they make spearamints. I thot he ment like where they made the chooing gum but now I think its puzzels and games because thats what we did.

The story raises simple moral questions about the value of human life and the progress of science, about which you can come to your own conclusions if you take my recommendation and read the book for yourself.