“I never used to like lace; I used to view it as old-fashioned,” she tells TVP World. “I began falling in love with lace seeing it used as patterning on ceramics. I saw that it was beautiful—more than that, it could exist on its own, not just as some decorative element on a mug or a plate.”

Hitting the Warsaw streets, she says, opened her mind: “After drawing my first lace on the street in 2009, I started perceiving public space differently. Everywhere, I saw amazing opportunities to create art.”

Lift-off was immediate. “From the very beginning, portals began publishing pictures of my work,” she says. “There wasn’t that much ceramic street art around, so straight away my art blew up online. Pretty much from that point on, I began to receive invites to participate in projects, so I’ve been traveling ever since!”

Quite why the public has embraced her work is not hard to fathom. “Fundamentally, it gives people good vibes,” she says.

“Lace naturally evokes feelings or memories associated with the family home, childhood, food, security, or the good old days, and I really believe that my lace-based works emit positive energy,” she adds. “People just like them and smile when they see them.”

As soul-warming as NeSpoon’s work is, its aesthetic beauty should not be overlooked. Composed of intriguing, intricate patterns, there is a delicate elegance at play that feels exquisite on the eye.

“Symmetrical lace patterns have a mesmerizing character,” says NeSpoon. “They can be seen in the world of nature, in the calyxes of flowers, in seashells, snowflakes, in patterns painted by the frost that gathers on windows… These are universal and recognizable all over the world, in all cultures.”

This commonality, however, ignores the uniqueness of NeSpoon’s international projects. Always inspired by local lace culture, the artist seeks to celebrate regional heritage through her output.

“I’m creating art for the people that actually live in a place, so of course I always try to use local patterns in my murals,” she says. “I want to give these laces a second life and finding them means engaging the community to learn what kind of lace patterns are characteristic of the region.”

In Bradford, England, that inspiration was found in the archives of a museum. Happening upon some lace produced at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the artist used a fragment of the pattern as the basis for an XL-sized mural. “Painted on the wall, it reminded me of a portal to another world,” she says.

While museums are one source of ideas, people are another and it is this direct contact the artist cherishes the most.

“On my last Italian project, I was working opposite the house of a 92-year-old woman that was still creating lace,” says NeSpoon. “Every day she’d be with her friends, and they’d all bring me food and tell me about their background. And the thing is, the same situation has repeated itself so many times.”

That her art so appeals to women is not shirked by the artist. In a statement on her website, NeSpoon writes: “Lace making was (and still is) cultivated almost exclusively by women and identified with femininity. Until recently, women’s lace circles were an important element of everyday life.

“Women working together talked about everyday problems, shared their joys and worries, and supported each other. To this day, the connection between lace and femininity is visible on my social media, where almost 80% of my followers identify as women.”

Despite these lopsided figures, appreciation of her work has crossed gender boundaries to thrust the artist into the public eye, something helped by the growing scale and scope of her projects.

Making the international art press, 2019 saw the artist transform an entire village square in Spain with lace patterns originating from a local monastery. In 2023, meanwhile, an abandoned library in Bosnia and Herzegovina received the NeSpoon treatment to find its walls and columns entwined in lace.

“The work was created in a symbolic place, in the building of the university library destroyed during the last war in the 1990s,” she says. “More than 100,000 books were burned there, so I created the installation with the intention of [bringing a message of] peace, understanding and a successful common future.”

Other sites have been equally emotive. Invited in 2017 to Pripyat, inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, the artist created a temporary installation formed from rubber bands.

“That was definitely my strangest job,” she says, “but while the installation was only temporary, I realize in hindsight that this is a place that shouldn’t have any artistic intervention.”

It is the large-format projects, though, that are the most challenging. “It’s physical work, and I often feel like a regular laborer,” she says.

Often reliant on outdated, antiquated boom lifts for her murals, it is the elements that pose the biggest problem while creating these giant works.

“It’s not uncommon for me to be working in the cold or rain, but hot weather is equally problematic—because I’m in a mask, you really start to feel it after painting for seven or eight hours in heat that’s 30-degrees plus.”

This, she hopes, will not be a problem for her next project. Heading back to Poland in the imminent future, it is Łódź that awaits with a mural set to be completed in time for an exhibition of her work slated for November 8.