If you are a street artist, the world is your canvas.
Street art is a diverse and constantly evolving art form. The exemplars for the same are impressioned on derelict buildings, bus shelters, public walls and hoardings across cities. While some see these artists as outlaws and their “masterpieces” as vandalism, for others it is a breath of fresh air.
Adding an ethereal dimension to street art with her installations, NeSpoon is anything but your regular street artist. Just go ahead and blur every single facet that is associate with graffiti while taking in her artwork. NeSpoon’s street art is all about lady-like details and patterns, including plenty of frills!
The Polish born artist NeSpoon covers gritty urban streets with intricate but delicate lace patterns to generate a touch of elegance in the bedlam of city life. The artist uses traditional ornamental lace as the foundation of her artworks, that take the form of both spray painted murals as well as hand-cut stencils strung up like luminous cobwebs.
She describes her work as an admixture of street art, pottery, painting, sculpture and jewellery. The primary objective behind the use of lace is the aesthetic code possessed by it, which is deeply embedded in every culture. In lace there is symmetry, a sort of order and harmony amidst chaos, which is what we seek in life. Her installations grant harsh cityscapes a new softness!
NeSpoon’s trademark lace installations and murals take inspiration from local textile arts. The crocheted lace dollies perfectly attached to everyday things throughout public spaces bring lace back to life. She explains,
I sample the patterns from real, existing laces. In my artwork I always try to use local laces from the country where I currently work.
Lace-making is an ancient craft, with ornate threads tracing back in the first half of the 14th century in Flanders. By selecting an art form associated with women, NeSpoon permeates her works with femininity. “I think that no man would use lace as his medium,” she said. “I travel a lot and all over the world only women weave laces.” Instead of rejecting this relegation of women to more than often unacknowledged practical arts, she celebrates the amalgamation of the lace with women’s work. “Maybe it is a proof that we are the source of natural harmony in the universe,” she said. “It flows out of us.”
NeSpoon views her art as “public jewellery,” particularly as an act of embellishment by turning deserted and modest spaces into something aesthetically exhilarating. In fact, the artist uses various techniques to cover the streets with lace. Her project “City Decor” is all about dressing up the streets of her hometown Warsaw, Poland, by obviously “lacing it up”!
The results of her unique style of art are stunning pieces that lend its viewers a sense of unparalleled serenity and the “host” city a brand new look. Even though her form of street art is pretty eccentric, but like most of the street artists, NeSpoon took to the streets in search of freedom that her studio and canvas were not capable of providing.
