Still having fun with the "twist along path" sweep feature in SolidWorks, the geometry in this image is sort of a compound version of this feature, with a small amplitude helix piled on top of a much larger looping path. I would have liked to have taken it one step further so that the final shape looked more like a long coiled spring, but the software limits out at about 80 revolutions over the length of the path, and the spring version would have needed something more like 800. The resulting model probably would have been way too much for even the 2Gb machine that I have at work to deal with anyway, so I had to settle for the spiral texture.
The background texture is based on the edges of a plane filling pattern from one of my other projects. I like the idea of the figure causing the background image to be distorted as if being viewed through a low power lens.