Playing with the 'trellis' from my earlier "Magic of Connection" picture as a 3d texture

I've been meaning to experiment with taking 2d art elements into Blender to see how I can mess with them there... Had a good play taking the 'trellis' from my previous pic and using it as layer in Blender:

I initially tried using it as a displacement map, but to get decent resolution I had to create a crazy number of sub-divisions on the plane, which was very slow, and most of them weren't needed anyhow since they were 'flat' (coplaner) in the background areas... I tried using the decimate modifier to remove these, but it crashed Blender... So instead I applied the picture as a texture on a simple rectangle, then used the alpha channel from the image to be the alpha of the texture, effectively 'deleting' the bacground areas.