Warsaw-Based Artist Spray-Paints A Beautiful Lace Mural On The Side Of A French Lace Museum

Calais is a city in northern France famous for its lace-making tradition. Turns out, back in the late 19th century, many textile artists and engineers from England immigrated to Calais to escape economic and social difficulties, turning the city into an industrial hub for lace manufacturing. Back then, around 40,000 of the residents were working in the local lace factories.

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The French Museum of Fashion and Lace, Cité de la Dentelle et de la Mode, was opened in a restored 19th-century factory building to honor the lace-making tradition in the city of Calais. Recently, one of the walls of the museum was graced by the hands of the Warsaw-based artist NeSpoon, who spray-painted it with an intricate lace design.

The artist describes all her works as being “somewhere in between street art, pottery, painting, sculpture, and jewellery.” Most of NeSpoon’s works consist of prints of traditional laces made in clay or painted on walls.

“Why laces? Because in laces there is an aesthetic code, which is deeply embedded in every culture. In every lace we find symmetry, some kind of order and harmony, isn’t that what we all seek for instinctively?” reads the artist’s Behance profile.

“Calais in northern France is famous for its lace-making tradition. In the past, local factories employed 40,000 people in the lace-making industry,” reads the description of the project. “Today in the city exists a unique lace museum. It is housed in a recently restored 19th-century factory building. In addition to the great collection of lace, it holds 200-year-old, still working lace-making machines. Learning how to control this machine at the master level took up to 12 years. The weaving master controlled 11,000 threads at the same time.”

For this particular project, the artist chose to spray-paint a machine lace pattern that was designed in 1894. She happened across this pattern in one of the catalogs available in the museum archive.

Here’s a little video from the artist’s Instagram profile, capturing the process of spray-painting:

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In progress. Calais / France @cite_dentelle_mode

A post shared by NeSpoon (@nes.poon) on Sep 20, 2020 at 6:22am PDT