The “Invisible” Heritage of Women in NeSpoon’s Lace Murals: A Symbolic and Educational Three-Case Study

Abstract

Street art increasingly reshapes aesthetic hierarchies by introducing previously marginalised media into the public sphere. A compelling example is the artistic practice of the Polish artist NeSpoon (Elżbieta Dymna), whose work merges the visual language of traditional lace with the communicative strategies of contemporary urban art. Active since the late 2000s, NeSpoon combines stencils, ceramic lace imprints, and large-scale murals to translate the intimacy of handcraft into the visibility of public space. Her works function as both aesthetic interventions and acts of civic pedagogy. This study employs a qualitative visual research design combining multi-site digital inquiry, iconological and semiotic analysis, and mini focus group (N = 22). Three purposefully selected cases: Łódź, Belorado, and Fundão, were examined to capture the site-specific and cultural variability of lace murals across Europe. The analysis demonstrates that lace functions as an agent of cultural negotiation and a medium of heritage literacy, understood here as embodied and place-based learning. In Łódź, it monumentalises textile memory and women’s labour embedded in the city’s industrial palimpsest. In Belorado, micro-scale responsiveness operates, strengthening the local semiosphere. In Fundão, lace enters an intermedial dialogue with azulejos, negotiating the boundary between craft and art while expanding local visual grammars. The study introduces the conceptualisation of the monumentalisation of intimacy in public art and frames heritage literacy as an embodied, dialogic, and community-oriented educational practice. Its implications extend to feminist art history, place-based pedagogy, urban cultural policy, and the preventive conservation of murals. The research elucidates how domestic craft once confined to the private interior operates in public space as a medium of memory, care, and inclusive aesthetics.

1. Introduction

Urban space is an environment where aesthetics, memories, and everyday practices intersect, and street art can reconfigure existing hierarchies, turning walls into dialogic spaces for community-based interpretation of place (Simões et al. 2023). Within this horizon, NeSpoon’s lace murals demonstrate how an idiom associated with domestic privacy and handwork attains the status of a public sign co-constituting the city’s semiosphere that is, the circulation of meanings that shape its identity (Lotman 2005).

NeSpoon (Elżbieta Dymna) is a Polish interdisciplinary artist whose practice bridges street art, craft heritage, and social engagement. Working across media from stencils and ceramic lace imprints to large-scale murals she translates traditional lace patterns into contemporary urban contexts. Her projects have been realised in over forty countries, including a monumental mural for the Museum for Lace and Fashion in Calais, France, which reinterprets a nineteenth-century machine-made lace pattern from the museum’s archives (DesignBoom 2020). NeSpoon’s work combines aesthetic intervention with community dialogue: she researches local textile histories, sources authentic patterns, and installs them on façades as gestures of visual care and shared memory. This hybrid approach positions her art between material culture research and public pedagogy, revealing how the intimacy of handcraft can inhabit and transform urban space (Juśkiewicz 2024; Urban Forms Foundation 2024).

A feminist art-historical perspective helps explain why, for decades, so-called “soft” media and women’s work were placed at the periphery of the canon despite their aesthetic and epistemic force (Pollock 1988; Parker 2010). Analyses of art–craft relations show that the division between “high art” and “craft” is a cultural construction that contemporary creative practices consistently challenge (Auther 2010). Bringing lace into the register of public art also strengthens the visibility of textile and embroidery practices as fully fledged forms of artistic expression (Rani et al. 2021).

Frameworks of site-specificity and the production of space underscore that the meanings of a work and of a place arise in reciprocal relation. A work situated in a particular location reads local histories while simultaneously rewriting urban legibility and the trajectories of everyday spatial use (Kwon 2002; Lefebvre [1974] 1991; de Certeau 1984). In turn, studies in material culture and embodied practice indicate that everyday things and patterns carry knowledge, participate in building relationships, and activate modes of knowing grounded in touch and bodily memory (Miller 2010; Ingold 2013). In this sense, lace ornament at an architectural scale operates haptically, as the eye “remembers” weave and texture, intensifying the experience of viewing in urban space (Marks 2002).

Our selected examples reveal three different modes of the pattern’s responsiveness to place. In Łódź a city with a well-documented textile heritage and a robust tradition of revitalisation and artivism the monumentalisation of lace activates memories of women’s labour and negotiates relations between the industrial palimpsest and contemporary strategies of public art (Kazimierczak 2014; Krupa-Ławrynowicz 2019; Sadowski and Sumorok 2023). In this context, NeSpoon’s most recent projects gain additional legibility through local institutions and exhibition circuits (Juśkiewicz 2024). In Belorado, a lace diptych scales to the rhythm of the square and everyday passage, serving as soft acupuncture of place that strengthens the space’s communal recognisability and dialogicity (Simões et al. 2023). In Fundão, lace enters an intermedial dialogue with azulejos, the region’s ornamental idiom, making visible how patterns migrate across materials and how boundaries between craft and contemporary art are negotiated (Gal 2022).

The street-art literature is extensive, yet it rarely combines a comparative lens on lace murals across European locations with a simultaneous emphasis on feminist art history, site-specificity, the materiality of practices, and their educational potential. In response, we propose to describe the phenomenon through two analytic categories. First, the monumentalisation of intimacy, which captures the transition of micro-ornament from domestic context to architectural scale and the relocation of care and handwork into the order of public visibility (Auther 2010; Parker 2010). Second, heritage literacy understood as an embodied, place-based practice of learning that links memory, care, and communal aesthetic deliberation in out-of-school settings (Giroux 2004a, 2004b; Gruenewald 2003a, 2003b; Sandlin et al. 2011). This perspective situates lace interventions within broader currents of community-based creativity and craftivism, where making and sharing things reinforce social relations and cultural agency (Gauntlett 2011; Greer 2014).

On this basis, we formulate the study’s aim: to explain how NeSpoon’s practice transforms women’s craft into a medium of visible heritage and operates as public pedagogy in specific urban configurations. We ask how patterns traditionally associated with the private sphere function in the public register; what aesthetic and symbolic shifts their site responsiveness generates; and how these processes support place-based heritage literacy. We then present theoretical frameworks, research design, and the analysis of three cases; the discussion outlines implications for feminist art history, public education, and urban cultural policy, together with notes on mural documentation and preventive conservation (Mezzadri 2021).

2. Feminist Art History and the Redefinition of Women’s Craft and Private Aesthetics

Since the 1970s, feminist art history has systematically exposed canon-forming mechanisms that privileged selected media and practices while marginalising forms tied to women’s labour in the private sphere (Pollock 1988; Parker 2010). Within this current, it is emphasised that the traditional division between “high art” and “craft” emerged under specific socio-cultural conditions and organised artistic visibility along hierarchical rather than ontological lines. Analyses of art-craft relations show that textile media and other “soft” techniques carry rich formal and semantic resources, even though they long functioned as private aesthetics tethered to domestic rituals and care work (Auther 2010; Adamson 2007).

Research on embroidery, weaving, and crochet points to their cognitive complexity and the social dimension of intergenerational transmission, locating them within the field of fully fledged visual culture rather than “merely” utilitarian pursuits (Rani et al. 2021). Perspectives from gender studies and material culture studies stress that products of textile craft are at once things and records of relations, memories, and local knowledges that circulate between body, material, and environment (Miller 2010; Ingold 2013). In this light, private aesthetics name a sphere of practice in which visual forms grow within the rhythms of domestic labour and are codified in ornaments, patterns, and the micro-textures of handwork.

Feminist approaches also develop categories of the political in everyday forms, pointing to frames of civic activity grounded in making such as craftivism where the linkage of care, manual work, and collective expression creates alternative channels of communication and memory (Greer 2014; Gauntlett 2011). From this vantage point, the redefinition of women’s craft unfolds on two levels: a theoretical recontextualisation that removes the low status of “needlework” in art-historical discourse, and a spatial recontextualisation in which idioms drawn from the domestic interior enter relations with public reception (Sargent 2025). The latter axis is elaborated in literature on feminist urban commons and practices of spatial appropriation, which provides a frame for the subsequent locational analyses (Levy 2023).

Consequently, the theoretical section assumes that the categories of “femininity”, “craft”, and “privacy” function as historically and culturally variable notions. Translating private aesthetics into registers of public visibility therefore requires tools that combine canon critique with attentiveness to materiality, embodiment, and the social biographies of patterns. Such tools are supplied by the frameworks discussed in the next section: site-specificity, the production of space, and the semiotics of the city.

3. Urban Semiospheres and Cultural Negotiations

Site-specific art presupposes a tight relationality of work and place, wherein the meaning of an image arises in response to the spatial, social, and cultural conditions of a given location. Meaning is not a portable property; it is produced in the entanglements of context, reception, and situated practices of spatial use (Kwon 2002). In a similar spirit, the theory of the production of space describes the city as the outcome of social relations and imagination rather than a neutral container of forms, drawing attention to conflicts, negotiations, and everyday practices that establish how places are used and interpreted (Lefebvre [1974] 1991; de Certeau 1984).

The concept of the semiosphere makes it possible to describe the urban circulation of signs as a dynamic system of co-existing codes in which images, inscriptions, ornaments, and paths of movement enter multi-layered relations, generating densities of meaning and memory landmarks (Lotman 2005). From the viewpoint of spatial perception, key notions include legibility and place markers, which organise everyday trajectories and support orientation in the city. Visual works embedded in the urban fabric can function as landmarks, shaping the perception of scale, rhythm, and relations between buildings and users (Lynch 1960). At the same time, affordance theory indicates that forms and surfaces offer certain possibilities for action and looking that audiences recognise in the practices of passing by, pausing, and “touching with the eyes” (Gibson 1979).

For the analysis of images in space, the tools of visual grammar and visual methodologies facilitate a move from formal description to cultural interpretation while maintaining consistent levels of reading and accounting for compositional, semantic, and pragmatic aspects (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006; Rose 2016; Banks and Zeitlyn 2015). Incorporating a haptic sensitivity helps capture modes of perception in which seeing asymptotically approaches touch and in which textures and weaves activate bodily memory crucial for textile materials and their translation to architectural scale (Marks 2002).

From the vantage point of making and embodied cognition, it is important to adopt perspectives that treat design and craft as forms of thinking in and through materials. The shift from “object-making” to “relation-making” opens art theory to processuality, performativity, and collaborative action, providing a key to analysing visual interventions in public space (Nimkulrat and Groth 2025; Ingold 2013). In this context, literature on art–craft relations emphasises that “soft media”, when introduced into the public sphere, can perform communicative and mnemonic functions, negotiating hierarchies of materials and visual idioms without privileging any single medium (Auther 2010).

These frameworks intersect with approaches to public pedagogy and place-based education, in which the city operates as a learning environment and images become tools of aesthetic and cultural deliberation in the everyday experience of passers-by. Here, heritage literacy is understood as an embodied and situated practice rather than merely declarative knowledge, enabling us to conceptualise how audiences form relations with the visuality of place and its histories (Giroux 2004a, 2004b; Gruenewald 2003a, 2003b; Smith 2006; Simões et al. 2023).

The foregoing theoretical matrix organises the levels of analysis used in the empirical section: the work–place relationality, the urban semiosphere and spatial legibility, the hapticity and materiality of images, and the educational potentials that follow from situating the work in public space. This ensures that subsequent parts of the text remain focused on the analysis of specific realisations, while cultural and educational evaluations and conclusions arise from reading the empirical material in light of the adopted frameworks.

4. Differentiating Craft: Techniques, Production Regimes, and Heritage Circuits

To avoid treating lace as a uniform category, we introduce an analytical distinction that differentiates technique, production regimes, and heritage circuits.

First, we recognise the diversity of techniques: needle lace, crochet, bobbin lace, and jacquard, each of which entails specific gestures, time intensities, and aesthetic grammars. These distinctions shape the affective and temporal load of the material: a handmade lace embodies the time of care and repetition, while a machine-produced pattern encodes industrial rhythm and seriality.

Second, we consider production regimes: lace as unpaid domestic work, as semi-professional home-based labour (piecework, chałupnictwo), and as industrial production within the textile economy. Each regime carries different meanings for women’s visibility and the valuation of labour.

Third, we account for heritage circuits, the ways in which lace circulates between private collections, local traditions, second-hand markets, and artistic recontextualisations. The heritage status of lace depends on whether it is transmitted as a family heirloom, reproduced in craft workshops, or rediscovered as an anonymous found object.

Particularly important is the ambiguity between handmade and machine-made lace, which in the case of NeSpoon’s practice cannot always be resolved from available documentation. We treat this indeterminacy not as a lack of data but as a hermeneutic opportunity. The tension between the hand and the machine encapsulates the historical transition from domestic craft to industrial production, a shift that defines the modern genealogy of textile culture. This ambiguity itself becomes an aesthetic and pedagogical resource, foregrounding how heritage oscillates between intimacy and seriality, care and technology, invisibility and monumentality. The subsequent case studies integrate these nuances, showing how each mural mediates between different temporalities, economies, and material agencies of lace.

5. Materials and Methods

The study was designed as a qualitative visual project aimed at capturing how the introduction of lace patterns into urban space renders marginalised women’s heritage visible and shifts aesthetic hierarchies in the public sphere. The research questions addressed, first, the transformation of patterns traditionally rooted in domestic labour into the register of public expression; second, the types and consequences of symbolic shifts resulting from situating these patterns within particular urban configurations; and third, ways of interpreting these processes within feminist art history, site-specific art, place-based education, and material culture studies (Pollock 1988; Parker 2010; Kwon 2002; Gruenewald 2003a, 2003b; Miller 2010; Ingold 2013).

The point of departure was a multi-site digital inquiry conducted in a netnographic mode, oriented towards reconstructing the contexts of production, circulation, and reception of selected works (Hine 2015; Kozinets 2010). Initial leads were established for Łódź and, following a purposeful maximum-variation sampling logic, two further cases were selected: Belorado in Spain and Fundão in Portugal. Selection was guided by the clarity of site-specific fit (relations to the history, identity, and architecture of place), comparative potential stemming from differing urban scales and scenographies, and educational–symbolic value that could enable work with memory and local heritage (Patton 2015). Preliminary mapping was expanded via a snowball technique to reach additional credible sources and illustrative materials (Noy 2008).

The data corpus consisted of publicly accessible materials: the artist’s and institutional partners’ websites, street-art and muralism portals and repositories, press coverage and municipal resources, as well as the authors’ photo documentation and audience posts, with metadata archived (URLs, dates of access, authorship). A credibility hierarchy prioritised authorial and institutional sources, then sectoral media, and subsequently user-generated materials; the corpus was stabilised upon reaching theoretical sufficiency (Hine 2015; Dey 1999).

The unit of analysis was a single mural situated in a specific location. For each case, a coding sheet organised three levels of image reading: (1) formal (scale, palette, composition, rhythm, vectors), (2) iconographic (motifs, citations, references), and (3) iconological (cultural threads, memory, practices of care), together with contextual fields: (1) site-specific relations (links to history and architecture, visibility within the street grid), (2) place-based aspects (legibility, pedestrian trajectories, stopping points), and (3) material-culture dimension (materiality, technique, the status of craft). Operationalisation drew on tools from visual grammar and visual methodologies, enabling a stepwise move from formal description to cultural interpretation (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006; Rose 2016; Banks and Zeitlyn 2015; Pink 2021). To describe perceptual experience, we employed the category of haptic visuality, helpful in analysing the translation of textures and weaves to architectural scale (Marks 2002), as well as the notions of studium and punctum, which organise the difference between contextual legibility and affective “pricks” of the image (Barthes 1980, 1981).

Image analysis was coupled from the outset with a diagnosis of reception. Two mini focus groups were conducted (N = 22; 17 women, 5 men) with students of cultural animation at the University of Szczecin. After a brief introduction to studium/punctum, participants engaged in guided viewing, produced written records of impressions, and proposed in situ educational activities. The material was processed using reflexive thematic analysis, combining inductive coding with mapping themes onto the adopted theoretical frames; analytic decisions were documented through an audit trail and memoing (Braun and Clarke 2006, 2021). The focus-group component was designed as a conceptual-validation proxy for haptic and affective reading of lace patterns under controlled conditions and as a complement to our multisite digital inquiry. Its role was to test the transferability and interpretive clarity of perceptual and pedagogical categories such as studium/punctum and haptic visuality, when participants engage with visual materials outside the original spatial context. In this sense, the focus groups served as a reflexive validation tool linking visual analysis with embodied perception and pedagogical imagination. Accordingly, claims about site-specificity rest on triangulation between: (1) visual analysis of the murals, (2) contextual and documentary sources, and (3) focus-group validation of perceptual and educational categories.

Trustworthiness was ensured through triangulation of sources (images, institutional materials, press, audience posts), theoretical triangulation (bringing Kwon, Lefebvre, and de Certeau into dialogue with Pollock and Parker, and with Miller and Ingold, supplemented by Gruenewald’s place-based education), and analytical triangulation, in which iconological–semiotic readings were confronted with focus-group data. Ongoing peer debriefing within the research team and transparent documentation of interpretive steps were standard practice. We adopted qualitative quality criteria credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability, as standards for structuring procedures and their transparency (Lincoln and Guba 1985).

Ethical issues pertained to two domains. First, when working with publicly accessible materials, we applied principles of accurate citation and respect for copyright. Visual ethics were also considered, including crediting authorship of public artworks, respecting intellectual property, and contextualising the artist’s statements. Second, in the focus-group component, we obtained informed consent, ensured anonymity, and guaranteed voluntary participation, in line with qualitative research practice in academic settings (Hine 2015).

The project encompassed three locations, combined image analysis and secondary sources, and incorporated two mini focus groups. This design limits statistical generalisation and instead reinforces an explanatory character, understood here in the sense of analytical generalisation. The use of punctum entails a risk of idiosyncratic responses, minimised through triangulation and cross-case comparison (Barthes 1980, 1981). This configuration maintains coherence between research questions and tools and prepares the ground for the empirical analyses, in which work–place relationality, the urban semiosphere, and embodied forms of reception are developed with reference to the three selected realisations (Kwon 2002; Lefebvre [1974] 1991; de Certeau 1984).

6. Lace Murals as a New Face of Heritage in Urban Space: A Case Study

6.1. Why Lace?

NeSpoon’s practice offers a distinct attempt to recontextualise the meanings ascribed to women’s handcraft. Present in over one hundred cities across forty-four countries, her realisations position lace once primarily a domestic ornament within the register of public art, opening a field for discussion about identity, memory, and representation in shared space. The artist herself has noted that she initially viewed lace as an “archaic” household element; over time she discerned in it a rigour of symmetry and harmony that carries values communicable beyond the local context (Juśkiewicz 2024).

Transferring the pattern from utilitarian supports (doily, tablecloth) to an architectural and symbolic scale constitutes a form of translation: the micro-ornament gains visibility, and its haptic memory of material is transposed into urban perception (Marks 2002). As a result, lace functions not merely as a decorative idiom but as a visual language recognisable across cultural contexts, resonating with literature on art–craft relations and the agency of everyday forms (Auther 2010; Adamson 2007). At the same time, the cultural biography of lace present in family collections and transmissions aligns with material-culture studies that emphasise things as carriers of relations, memory, and local knowledges (Miller 2010; Ingold 2013). In this sense, lace has a potential for universalisation through materiality: it is recognisable across borders while rooted in specific techniques and motifs.

In this study, three realisations in Poland, Spain, and Portugal show how the same idiom operates within distinct urban and cultural constellations, generating different modes of site responsiveness and different ways of “reading” place.

6.2. The Lace Mural in Łódź: Revaluing the City’s Textile Heritage

Łódź, often dubbed the “Polish Manchester” due to the nineteenth-century dominance of the textile industry (Kazimierczak 2014) provides a particularly dense context for NeSpoon’s mural (2024, 217 Wólczańska Street). The label is grounded both in institutional accounts and in scholarship on the region’s post-industrial heritage (Sadowski and Sumorok 2023; Krupa-Ławrynowicz 2019). The tenement façade, covered with an enlarged lace pattern sourced by the artist from a local find and deliberately embedded in the city’s fabric, “weaves” a new narrative that links material textile heritage with its contemporary revaluation through public art. In this view, Łódź functions as a palimpsest of industrial and social memory: layers of the former factory metropolis are today reread and rewritten by revitalisation practices, institutional activities (e.g., the Central Museum of Textiles in the “White Factory”), and artistic interventions in urban space. This shift is not merely aesthetic: it moves emphasis from the city’s production-oriented imaginary towards craft-material competences and the memory of labour, in line with approaches in Polish urban studies (Jałowiecki and Szczepański 2002) and research on the revitalisation of Łódź’s post-industrial areas.

This historical landscape is complemented by a local genealogy of lace: Łódź was home to Gustaw Geyer’s jacquard lace factory, which, after his death, was run by Helena Geyer. “I visited the Central Museum of Textiles and reviewed lace in the archives,” the artist recalled, noting: “I found the pattern in Łódź, in a second-hand shop, and decided it would be perfect for this wall” (Juśkiewicz 2024). The precise origin and technique of the found lace remain unknown it could be either handmade or machine-produced (jacquard). Rather than treating this uncertainty as a limitation, we interpret it as a productive ambiguity that mirrors the city’s dual genealogy: the domestic and the industrial.

If the lace was handmade, it materialises the slow time of domestic labour and the repetitive gestures of care traditionally performed by women. If machine-made, it resonates with Łódź’s industrial heritage, the automation of textile work, and the transformation of tactile craft into the logic of serial production.

In both readings, the mural operates as a hinge between two economies of making, bridging private and industrial histories of textile culture. The ambiguity of the source thus becomes conceptually generative, revealing how NeSpoon’s work monumentalises intimacy while revaluing labour through public art. In this light, NeSpoon’s mural restores to memory the delicate, often overlooked sphere of women’s handwork lace associated with domestic labour and marginalised for decades in official art narratives.

The project was realised with the support of the Urban Forms Foundation, with Teresa Latuszkiewicz as curator (Figure 1). The composition relies on strong chromatic contrast, and the pattern scaled up almost two hundred times relative to the original doily produces an effect of the monumentalisation of intimacy: a motif associated with the intimacy of the kitchen table comes to dominate the street’s landscape, initiating encounters with passers-by and activating new ways of sensing place.

The analysis of NeSpoon’s lace mural in Łódź revealed several interdependent aesthetic and semantic dimensions. The symmetrical arrangement of floral motifs operates here as an urban mandala: stripped of its utilitarian ground (tablecloth, doily), the pattern is elevated from an everyday object to an icon of public space. Subtle paint gradations faithfully imitate the weave and twist of thread, activating what Laura U. Marks calls haptic visuality a mode of perception in which seeing asymptotically approaches touch (Marks 2002). In this sense, one looks as if almost feeling the fibres beneath the fingers.

From the perspective of Barthes’s categories, the studium organises a dense network of cultural and social references: the mural points to women’s heritage rendered invisible within the canon of high art, to the industrial memory of Łódź, and to ongoing debates over the value hierarchies of materials and media (Parker 2010; Auther 2010). In the logic of site-specificity, the work responds to its environment: the tenement façade, located in a district marked by an industrial past, becomes a vehicle for telling stories of local identity, the “invisible” heritage of women, and the cultural value of craft (Kwon 2002). The studium thus discloses the mural’s historical and cultural density it connects Łódź’s textile traditions, the memory of women’s work, and disputes over visuality in public space. In this sense, the work performatively elevates material culture (lace) to the level of a civic symbol, prompting embodied reflection on value in public art (Miller 2010; Ingold 2013).

Within this contextual field, the punctum may manifest in several ways. It can be invited by the horizontal sweep of the composition, which fills the peripheral field of vision and subtly “grips” the viewer’s body, or it potentially emerges in the microtraces of manual process slight “imperfections” of brushwork and spray rhythms details that disclose hand labour and the materiality of execution (Barthes 1981). These performative signals remind us that although the lace has been monumentalised, it retains the intimate and affective character of craft. A motif traditionally viewed at very close range and on a small scale now stretches across an entire façade, an effect describable as the monumentalisation of intimacy: delicacy and fragility are inscribed into the scale of the street and the flow of passersby (cf. Parker 2010; Auther 2010). What the viewer experiences as punctum is thus not a fixed quality of the image but an invited affective event, dependent on perception, movement, and embodied attention. In extending Barthes’s concept of punctum beyond the photographic image, we treat it here as an interpretive lens capable of capturing the affective and haptic impact of large-scale public artworks. This shift allows punctum to operate not only as a marker of subjective intensity but also as an analytic bridge between visual semiotics and embodied urban pedagogy. In the context of street art, the punctum may arise through scale, tactility, or spatial encounter, translating the viewer’s bodily proximity into a moment of affective learning. This approach situates emotional and sensory response as a legitimate dimension of visual inquiry within public space.

At close range, the punctum may also operate in the texture of lines: viewed individually, the rosettes and stylised flowers appear not merely decorative but palpably textural. Looking closely strengthens the affirmation of women’s labour, transposed into a scale and format that cannot be ignored. The emotional resonance stems from contrast: what is invisible, intimate, and “private” becomes public, large-format, and saturated with meaning (Pollock 1988; Parker 2010). In line with the artist’s declarations about working with a “pure pattern” abstracted from utilitarian supports, the mural underscores the autonomy of ornament as a carrier of memory and identity (cf. Juśkiewicz 2024).

The visual analysis is complemented by reception data from two mini focus groups (N = 22) with students of cultural animation education. After a brief introduction to studium/punctum, participants engaged in guided viewing, and proposed in situ educational activities. Reflexive thematic analysis revealed motifs that link aesthetic and social experience (Braun and Clarke 2006, 2021). A recurring thread concerned the “release of women’s memory”: the mural was likened to a doily taken from a grandmother’s drawer and unfurled above the city as an indelible sign of gendered histories of labour (Hooks 1984). Respondents also emphasised a revaluation of artistic hierarchies: lace, long marginalised as “decoration”, gains the status of an artwork in public space, while street art exceeds the boundaries of popular aesthetics. The scale of the painting activated a bodily experience, with one participant noting that, while viewing the façade on a large screen, “you can feel like a thread in the loom”, aptly expressing the embodied dimension of sensing place (Ingold 2015). Proposals for craft workshops by the mural emerged as indicators of the intervention’s participatory potential. Some participants read the lace structure as an ecological metaphor, resonating with new materialist visions of relational matter (Bennett 2010).

From a pedagogical perspective, the mural teaches several things at once: (1) it broadens heritage literacy, presenting heritage as a process of actualisation; (2) it introduces a feminist economy of attention by monumentalising small, invisible labour, it prompts a revision.

As a result, the Łódź mural is not a mere “wallpaper” for a façade but a visual–affective educational platform that revalorises local textile heritage, brings women’s narratives to the fore, and expands the repertoire of street art with a perspective of craft and materiality. The term “wallpaper” is used here in the critical sense proposed by Rushmore (2016), who contrasts merely decorative interventions with street artworks that function dialogically within public discourse.

6.3. The Universalism of Local Tradition in the Muralscape of Belorado

Belorado, a small town in the province of Burgos (Castile and León), offers a setting markedly different from Łódź, a more intimate context for NeSpoon’s intervention. Two adjacent façades on a small square (Figure 2) form a micro-scene of everyday life: a space for encounters, brief stops, and neighbourly conversations. In this configuration, lace patterns do not “compete” with monumental architecture; rather, they organise the scale of the place, acting as soft urban acupuncture (cf. Lynch 1960; de Certeau 1984). Inscribed into the square’s topography, they bridge two buildings into a single legible composition a diptych with a shared axis and rhythm.

The white lace, spread across a neutral ground, “binds” the two elevations and functions as a linking sign within the local semiosphere (Lotman 2005): it singles the site out from the streetscape while remaining affordant to it (Gibson 1979). In contrast to industrial Łódź, Belorado strengthens a mode of site responsiveness (Kwon 2002): scale, palette, and detail are tuned to the rhythm of the lane, doorways, corners, and the day’s changing light. An aerial photograph (Figure 3) confirms the effect: against the region’s rooflines and sandy façades, the lace forms a bright, geometric organic figure that stands out within the urban fabric, acting as a subtle yet highly legible visual anchor (Lynch 1960).

In terms of studium/punctum (Barthes 1981), the image “works” along two tracks. Studium organises the interweaving of local handcraft traditions with the global language of street art: a domain of domestic labour delicate, time-consuming, historically marginalized moves into the public sphere and is recognised as a fully fledged bearer of meanings (Parker 2010; Auther 2010). Punctum appears, first, in the contrast between the town’s calm and the pattern’s unexpected scale, and second, in the micro-textures of strokes and retouches that reveal hand labour and the materiality of making. This monumentalisation of intimacy by enlarging a motif usually contemplated up close intensifies the image’s presence in the viewer’s body (Marks 2002).

Belorado demonstrates how local tradition becomes universalised: lace rooted in domestic practice is positioned in shared space as a symbol of community and memory. This is not about “decorating a wall”, but about negotiating aesthetic hierarchies and redirecting attention to craft as a carrier of public value (Miller 2010; Ingold 2013). In this sense, the murals both continue heritage and translate it into a contemporary idiom without losing local recognisability (Kwon 2002; Smith 2006).

Respondents described the mural as a soft intervention in a hard fabric, observing that through this transformation women’s work attains a scale that cannot be ignored. Ecological readings also emerged, with lace as a network of relations among people, homes, and environment, resonating with new materialism (Bennett 2010). Perceptive were remarks on processuality: “sun, wind and patina will do their own work with this pattern. Heritage lives here” (Smith 2006).

The square thus becomes an open-air classroom: “It begs for neighbourly crochet workshops under the wall heritage passes from eyes to hands” (Greer 2014; Sandlin et al. 2011; Giroux 2004a, 2004b). In a single frame, pattern, geometry, memory and women’s biographies meet. The mural functions as an apparatus of public pedagogy that supports learning through presence, experience, and cooperation.

Here the identity of place is woven from the delicate threads of everyday life which, enlarged to the scale of architecture, acquire the status of a shared aesthetic and educational good. Lace simultaneously serves as ornament, as a vehicle of memory, and as an invitation to communal practice broadening the understanding of heritage to include forms derived from traditional handcraft and inscribing them into the landscape of the everyday.

6.4. Dialogue with Ceramic Ornament and the City’s Multicultural History: The Lace Mural in Fundão

In Fundão, renowned for its colourful azulejos that have adorned façades for centuries, the lace mural becomes a different kind of intervention. Placed in dialogue with local ornament, history, and architectural codes, the lace pattern both harmonises with and contrasts against Portuguese decorative traditions. This conversation between lace and azulejos can be read as a meeting of two co-equal craft forms: one grounded in women’s textile handwork, the other in ceramics saturated with the region’s colonial, commercial, and artistic histories.

Within the cultural register, the mural (Figure 4) establishes a field of comparison between two idioms of ornament. Lace, usually associated with the soft materiality of fibre, is translated into the “language” of the wall and of architectural scale. Azulejos by nature hard, cool, and geometric are met by an organic, openwork line. This configuration operates as a site-specific matrix (Kwon 2002): the lace pattern is “written into” the rhythm of windows, cornices, and corners, while simultaneously conversing with the tiled modules present in the surroundings. The material culture of place is revealed: ornament does not perform a merely decorative role but becomes a carrier of memory and everyday practice (Miller 2010; Ingold 2013). The result is a new semiosphere of the square a visual “duet” of lace and ceramic that organises the perception of passers-by and strengthens the location’s recognisability. Participants captured this “duet” in remarks such as: “The softness of thread speaks to the tile’s module; the square acquires a new grammar”, and “It’s like a third azulejos woven with paint rather than fired in a kiln”.

Read in this way, studium discloses the place’s material culture: ornament is not passive decoration; it becomes a vehicle of practice, memory, and communal habit (Miller 2010; Ingold 2013). Lace once associated with the domestic table is translated into the language of architecture and urban visibility.

The affective force of the experience arises from contrasts of scale and light. The white mesh of the pattern pulsates on the dark plaster; sunlight draws out differences in line density. Students described it thus: “Up close the eyes remember the feel of cotton; from a distance I see a map of bays and rivers”. “The figure at the bottom of the frame acts as a measure the lace exceeds our everyday expectations”. This moment of Punctum, a sudden flash of meaning, transposes the intimate motif of the doily into the register of an urban sign, intensifying the experience of looking and steering it toward questions about the status of women’s labour in art history.

Juxtaposing the two traditions reveals different regimes of visibility. For decades, azulejos functioned as an official emblem of representation; lace tied to labour carried out in private remained outside the canon. The monumentalisation of lace in Fundão triggers a symbolic “levelling”. As participants observed: “Here ornament does not decorate in a servile way; it speaks like a coat of arms only woven”. “Herstory meets the city’s history; two memories play in unison”.

From the perspective of the production of space (Lefebvre [1974] 1991; de Certeau 1984), the mural functions as an interface connecting urban and biographical layers. The pattern “stitches” the façade together, guiding the gaze across windows and cracks in the plaster and initiating behaviours: pausing, photographing, touching. “The habit of passing by turns into a ritual of looking; the wall begins to tell a story”. The square by the mural operates as an open-air studio of public pedagogy. Natural scenarios of practice emerge, extending the work’s pedagogical reach beyond the artistic sphere: mapping ornaments across the block, lessons in the geometry of pattern, workshops that combine textile stencils with clay impressions. As one student declared: “I want to run a workshop from lace motif to clay stamp learning moves from eyes to hands”. Such “translations” between media strengthen heritage literacy: heritage becomes an experience rather than merely a topic of narration. Lace on plaster and ceramic on the wall enter different relations with climate and time; wind, dust, and sunlight will “work” on the painting’s surface, building a patina. “Sun and dust will weave a layer of memories here; you can see heritage ripening”. This thread resonates with the relational view of matter (Bennett 2010) and with an understanding of heritage as process (Smith 2006).

Against the background of Łódź (the monumentalisation of intimacy in an industrial context) and Belorado (stitching together neighbourhood scale and identity), Fundão reveals an intermedial and intercultural dimension. The dialogue between lace and azulejos shows how patterns migrate across materials and how their meanings are reconfigured depending on place, history, and practices of spatial use. “Here you can see that patterns travel faster than materials; meaning does not end with thread or tile.”

7. Discussion

7.1. Making Invisible Heritage Visible

The discussion foregrounds two interrelated conceptual axes that frame this study: heritage literacy and place-based pedagogy. These categories clarify how NeSpoon’s practice transforms women’s craft into a visible and participatory form of heritage while operating as a model of public pedagogy situated in urban contexts. Reading the empirical findings through these lenses enables a coherent interpretation of how lace murals simultaneously reclaim women’s material heritage and activate informal, embodied learning in public space.

The analysis indicates that NeSpoon’s murals do more than perform an aesthetic function; they also open space for reinterpreting meanings related to heritage, gender, art, and visual education. In doing so, they contribute to the development of heritage literacy, understood here as a form of embodied, dialogic learning through which viewers and communities engage critically with the visual traces of women’s work in public space. This practice exceeds the bounds of a typical artistic intervention, aligning with a broader context of socio-cultural activism and critical urban education. The ambiguity of the material source a lace that could be either handmade or mechanically produced underscores the complexity of heritage itself. It reveals how domestic craft and industrial design are not opposites but interconnected strata of women’s creative and economic histories. Recognising this ambiguity prevents the essentialisation of “feminine handwork” and situates NeSpoon’s practice within the broader genealogy of textile modernity, where the intimate gesture of making meets the collective scale of production.

The most salient aspect to emerge is the role these murals play in making visible the “invisible” heritage of women handcraft, the domestic sphere, and culturally marginalised feminine aesthetics. Lace, a medium long reduced to decorative-utilitarian status, is elevated to a fully fledged visual code in urban space. This gesture constitutes an act of symbolic restitution that restores value to forms of creativity previously overlooked by the narratives of so-called high art (Parker 2010; Pollock 1988).

In this sense, NeSpoon’s practice can be read as a form of visual revolution consistent with feminist art history: a strategy for reclaiming space and meaning for women’s experiences and creative practices. Such a shift implies the deconstruction of oppositions between “private” and “public”, “utilitarian” and “artistic”, “feminine” and “neutral” revealing that each category is culturally constructed rather than universal.

7.2. Murals as Site-Specific Interventions: Art as Social Practice

In line with the theory of site-specific art (Kwon 2002), an artwork situated in space not only enters into dialogue with its local context but also reshapes how that place is perceived. This relational reading of craft oscillating between manual and mechanical, unpaid and industrialised reinforces the site-specific dimension of NeSpoon’s interventions. Each mural not only inhabits its physical location but also stages a dialogue between different economies of making inscribed in the material history of the place. In the cases analysed: Łódź, Belorado, and Fundão the lace murals do not function as abstract patterns detached from reality. On the contrary, they are deeply immersed in local history, social memory, and urban aesthetics. Each example shows lace as both material and symbol, being drawn into the production of urban space (Lefebvre [1974] 1991), generating new configurations of meaning.

These configurations not only reframe the aesthetic of place but also foster place-based learning, whereby the material histories of the site become resources for reflection, dialogue, and collective memory. Through this process, NeSpoon’s murals exemplify how artistic practice can serve as a pedagogy of locality, connecting past and present through visual and embodied experience.

The results also suggest that NeSpoon’s murals should be understood as social practice activity that engages local communities, appeals to family memory, and sometimes even invites direct contributions from residents, e.g., in “Share Your Lace”-type actions. The artist’s interventions thus align with participatory and relational art, where the creative process exceeds the individual gesture and becomes part of social dialogue and value exchange. NeSpoon’s murals reorganise the city’s aesthetic by inscribing emotionality, intimacy, and care qualities usually absent from the languages of urbanism and architecture.

7.3. A Shift in Thinking About Cultural Heritage

The findings confirm the need to redefine heritage. Lace, as an artefact linked to intergenerational memory, women’s labour, and the aesthetics of everyday life becomes a living cultural resource, re-read in different contexts by diverse audiences. Such heritage does not require museum display cases; it needs spaces where it can be affectively present, visible, and emotionally experienced. This aligns with the notion of heritage literacy, in which learning emerges not from formal instruction but through sensory participation, emotional resonance, and the negotiation of shared cultural meanings in everyday environments. NeSpoon’s murals provide precisely such spaces.

Lace as an artefact connected with intergenerational memory, women’s work, and everyday aesthetics belongs to a different order: intimate, informal, and often ephemeral. Through NeSpoon’s interventions, this heritage is restored as a symbolic resource that can be reinterpreted and affectively lived in public space. Lace as heritage does not exist in isolation; it is part of a living history transmitted across generations, often orally and through doing. As material culture theory stresses (Miller 2010; Ingold 2013), everyday objects embroideries, doilies, lace are not merely carriers of aesthetics but also of social relations, family histories, and local knowledge. By fixing these forms on city walls, NeSpoon not only “archives” them in a new way but also enables them to participate in public discourse on heritage.

This shift can also be considered within the postulates of feminist art history (Pollock 1988; Parker 2010), which for decades has sought recognition of women’s everyday creativity long pushed to the margins as a legitimate component of the cultural landscape. Building upon this tradition, Nomeikaite (2023) extends feminist readings of material culture into the field of affective heritage, arguing that street art operates as a form of heritage-as-practice in which emotions, atmospheres, and embodied encounters become modes of cultural transmission. From this perspective, NeSpoon’s murals can be understood not only as visual acts of feminist restitution but also as affective environments where memory is experienced rather than merely represented. NeSpoon shows that a wall need not be “just a wall”; it can be a screen on which alternative narratives of memory unfold. Unlike museums which require specific cultural preparation and often operate “from above” street art democratises access to heritage, becoming part of the everyday experience of passers-by, residents, and local communities.

Accordingly, cultural heritage is not only what is “preserved”, but also what is animated and reinterpreted in light of contemporary needs. Lace on a wall ceases to be decoration and becomes a living language of memory, a form of intergenerational dialogue, and a critical tool against exclusionary definitions of art and history. Through such practices, the heritage paradigm expands from elite, institutional narratives toward inclusive, communal, and affective forms of cultural rootedness.

7.4. Pedagogical and Social Dimensions: Murals as Public Spaces of Informal Learning

In the context of public art and heritage, the pedagogical dimension of NeSpoon’s work is equally significant. It exceeds aesthetic impact to perform educational, social, and cultural functions. Her lace murals operate as informal learning spaces where knowledge about women’s heritage, local history, and marginalised aesthetics becomes accessible to broad audiences outside schools, museums, and cultural institutions.

NeSpoon’s art democratises access to knowledge, freeing it from elitism and academic jargon. The aesthetics of lace, rooted in everyday experience, evoke memories of family homes, grandmothers, and local traditions. Within this affective register, Nomeikaite (2023) demonstrates how street art’s pedagogical potential arises precisely through such embodied atmospheres, where sensory experience and emotional resonance foster informal processes of heritage learning. The murals function as affective maps of memory, enabling emotional and cognitive identification even among viewers without formal artistic training (Praslova 2025). Their legibility lies not in simplification but in their grounding in universal codes of material culture forms that remain close to lived experience.

Consistent with place-based education (Gruenewald 2003a), NeSpoon’s murals support the cultivation of bonds with place through local narratives, craft idioms, and the active incorporation of the past into the present urban landscape. Public space thus becomes a living classroom in which participants learn history, empathy, attentiveness to detail, and awareness of social roles, including those omitted for decades. At the same time, NeSpoon’s practice aligns with critical pedagogy, which poses questions about power, representation, and the possibility of change. Lace, treated as a serious artistic medium, challenges traditional hierarchies of art and prompts reflection on what is recognised as heritage, who has the right to make art history, and how everyday forms of expression can become political. Such art possesses emancipatory potential: we do not only learn about it we learn through it, acquiring new modes of perceiving ourselves and the world.

NeSpoon’s work is also an instance of affective education learning through emotions, senses, intuition, and bodily memory. Barthes’s category of punctum (1980) aptly captures why monumental lace patterns act with such force. Their unexpected presence in the city arrests attention, provokes questions, and moves the viewer; one does not so much “read” the mural as experience it, and that experience lingers.

In practice, NeSpoon’s murals can serve as starting points for educational workshops, interdisciplinary lessons linking art, history, geography, ethnography, and civic education, as well as for local debates or participatory projects. Their presence in public space fosters informal learning through everyday contact and observation, without the need to visit galleries or open textbooks. They function as tools of cultural reflection and intergenerational dialogue, enabling people to reread their own identities and to recognise the value embedded in objects and practices often overlooked or trivialised. In this sense, NeSpoon’s murals are not only works of art; they are open educational environments in which visual culture becomes an impulse for reflection, critique, and collective action.

In each analysed location, the murals generate pedagogical affordances that link embodied perception with place-based heritage learning. Drawing on the spatial grammars identified in the analysis and on the participants’ proposals, we can outline three illustrative scenarios of informal education.

In Łódź, the mural invites a workshop model “from doily to façade”, a guided viewing and sketching session combined with storytelling about women’s textile labour and family memory.

In Belorado, the lace diptych supports “neighbourhood crochet gatherings under the wall”, community workshops where making and conversation merge, translating ornament into social practice.

In Fundão, the interplay between lace and azulejos suggests a “from thread to clay” exercise translating lace motifs into clay impressions and reflecting on the migration of patterns across materials.

These situated examples demonstrate how murals afford embodied learning through seeing, touching, and doing, making heritage literacy a lived, sensory, and dialogic experience in everyday urban environments.

Collectively, these cases demonstrate that heritage literacy and place-based pedagogy intersect as mutually reinforcing processes: through embodied aesthetic experience, participants learn to read the city as a living archive of care, memory, and intergenerational creativity. In this sense, affect and embodiment become core dimensions of heritage literacy, where learning occurs through felt experience rather than formal narration.

8. Interpretation of Findings

8.1. Murals as Cultural Acts of Communication

Interpreting the collected materials against the theoretical background allows us to view NeSpoon’s murals not only as artworks but as cultural acts of communication that activate multilayered relations among form, place, history, and identity, initiating a dialogue between form and content, viewer and space. Lace, a fragile, soft material, produced slowly, here becomes a monumental visual sign whose public presence disrupts established aesthetic and social conventions. These works exceed an exclusively aesthetic function to serve as carriers of ideas, communal values, and memory. Through their emplacement in public space, they set interpretive processes in motion processes co-created by local communities. Each mural functions as a point of contact between private histories and the shared, integrated cultural landscape of the city.

8.2. Lace as a Language of Everyday Culture: Rehabilitating Women’s Handcraft

In NeSpoon’s murals, lace acquires the status of a symbolic language an aesthetic vehicle for communicating everyday life, care, and intimacy. Its presence on city walls represents an aesthetic long deemed too “domestic” or “feminine” to enter the discourse of high art. Yet lace proves to be a universal emotional code, conveying calm, harmony, and attachment to tradition. Its public display reverses prevailing logics of representation, showing that the everyday can become a source of deep cultural expression.

NeSpoon’s practice is a visual and symbolic act of restoring value to handcraft traditions pushed to the margins of art history for decades. Lacework, embroidery, and crochet once dismissed as “women’s handiwork” were reduced to hobbyist pursuits stripped of cultural significance. By installing these forms in public space at monumental scale, NeSpoon claims them as heritage. This is not only an aesthetic rehabilitation but also a political gesture: an insistence that previously sidelined creative forms deserve a place in debates on culture and identity. For centuries, handcraft associated with femininity and confined to the private sphere was omitted from art-historical discourse. As Rozsika Parker (2010) argues, so-called “women’s work” remained invisible in art history despite being central to women’s lives and expression. NeSpoon not only recalls this legacy but reanimates it through monumental murals that become memorials to women’s handcrafting genius. Such practice aligns with contemporary theories of everyday creativity (Gauntlett 2011), which hold that seemingly non-professional, routine creative actions can carry profound expressive, social, and cultural weight.

8.3. Craftivism and Women’s Visual Activism

NeSpoon’s work gains an additional layer when read through the lens of craftivism, activism enacted through handcraft (Greer 2014). In this current, aesthetics and the political are not opposites but tightly interwoven. Lace in NeSpoon’s murals does not merely beautify space; it bears demands, mounts critique and stages a visual protest against the marginalisation of women’s heritage. Lace ceases to be only a pattern; it becomes an instrument of action. Its monumentalisation in the city is an act of resistance to the sidelining of women’s expressive forms. Thus, the artist does more than decorate; she reformulates space, endowing it with new meanings and contexts. NeSpoon’s murals are visual manifestos that speak in the idiom of care, sisterhood, and social rootedness. These actions dovetail with a growing wave of artistic activism grounded in tenderness, community, and empathy exemplified by the Heart Projects that arose in response to the 2011 attacks in Norway (Kvernbakken 2011) and by the affective practice of yarn bombing, where acts of care and repair become visible in public space (Prain 2019).

8.4. Lace as a Visual Code of Relationality

Delicate, symmetrical, and meticulously executed, NeSpoon’s lace patterns operate as visual signs of relationality: carriers not only of aesthetics but also of memory, human ties, and social emotion. The artist intentionally uses lace as a medium that does more than adorn, it connects people across cultural, generational, and geographic boundaries. Each pattern becomes a kind of “map of bonds”, woven from stories, gestures, and presences (Adamson 2007). Lace motifs familiar from grandmothers’ homes tablecloths, doilies, decorative textiles evoke familial closeness, care, and the gesture of tending. Transposed to architectural scale on façades, they gain new monumentality while preserving their intimate semantics. The mural thus becomes a space where the private meets the public: domestic aesthetics enter the urban landscape and redefine its meanings (Barthes 1980).

As a visual code of community and empathy, lace can also be read in relation to diverse ethnographic and cultural traditions. Although specific designs may originate in local sources: Polish, Italian, Portuguese their formal structure, grounded in rhythm, symmetry, and organic motifs, makes them broadly legible. In this sense, lace functions as a transcultural language, enabling wordless communication based on shared recognition of emotion, memory, and everyday aesthetics (Ingold 2013; Parker 2010).

NeSpoon emphasises that mural production often engages local communities residents, women who contribute family lace patterns, makers who share memories. The mural thus results from collaboration and exchange rather than solely the artist’s individual expression. It becomes a relational artwork in which remembrance is enacted as a communal visual act (Gauntlett 2011). Moreover, lace in public space restores value to aesthetics of tenderness and care long marginalised as “unmanly” or “unartistic.” Delicacy, care, and rhythmic repetition become signs of communal strength, intergenerational continuity, and the unbroken cultural transmission preserved through gesture, pattern, and material (Parker 2010; Miller 2010). The mural emerges as a symbolic meeting ground: past with present, private with public, local with universal, personal with collective. As a visual code, lace not only organises aesthetic space; it opens it to social, familial, and emotional relations precisely in this bridge-building potential lies its force and cultural agency.

8.5. The Performativity of Space and Memory: Punctum and the Affective Force of Murals

Following Lefebvre ([1974] 1991), urban space is not neutral; it is socially and culturally produced. NeSpoon’s murals are one modality of that production: they act performatively, giving places new meanings and reshaping residents’ relations to their surroundings. Lace previously absent from the urban vocabulary changes how space is experienced and remembered. The murals become landmarks not only visually but symbolically, signs of histories previously untold.

One of the strongest interpretive threads in NeSpoon’s work is affect. Barthes’s (1980) category of punctum captures those moments when the image in this case the lace pattern strikes emotionally, provoking stirring, surprise, wonder, nostalgia. Punctum lends the mural an individual dimension of experience, making it not just a cultural sign but an emotional and sensorial stimulus. Through this affective action, the murals function not only as visual works but as carriers of memory and relation. NeSpoon does not merely make art; she creates conditions in which material speaks in its own voice and place becomes a space of dialogue. Lace then becomes not only a pattern but an experience awakening memories, emotions, and personal associations.

From a methodological perspective, this affective dimension also expands the application of Barthes’s punctum. While originally conceived in relation to the still photographic image, punctum in this study functions as a dynamic analytic tool for understanding how viewers experience urban art through bodily presence, movement, and proximity. The affective “prick” of the mural emerges not only from its visual composition but also from the sensory and spatial conditions of encounter. By translating punctum into the register of embodied urban pedagogy, the analysis underscores how affect itself can become a mode of informal learning and mnemonic activation in public space.

8.6. Representation and Reclaiming Space: Visual Manifesto and Invitation to Reflection

NeSpoon’s practice constitutes a form of reclaiming urban space for women, for everyday histories, for heritage that has been overlooked. Inscribed into the public realm, lace becomes a sign of resistance to dominant visual narratives: visible, impossible to ignore, and durable. The artist transforms the city’s visual language, introducing an aesthetic grounded not in domination and force but in relationality, care, and sensuousness. As with yarn bombing (Kępa 2022), the lace murals embody the conviction that public space can be made familiar, endowed with agency, and transformed by artistic action. This is not merely decoration; it is a claim to the right of aesthetic, historical, and emotional presence.

NeSpoon’s murals should be read as critical and affective acts that cross the boundaries between art and education, ornament and symbol, privacy and publicity. Lace becomes a material vehicle of cultural and visual change; the artist reclaims it as a political, pedagogical, and aesthetic medium quiet yet radical. This action joins a broader politics of representation that asks not only who has the right to speak, but also which forms of expression are recognised as valuable. In this way, urban space is “domesticated” by aesthetics previously excluded.

This interpretive context situates NeSpoon’s work even more firmly within a transdisciplinary current of contemporary critical art that weaves together memory, gender, material culture, everyday aesthetics, and visual activism. Her laces woven from histories and emotions are at once manifestos and invitations to reflection. NeSpoon’s murals are visual manifestos that bind beauty to critique, aesthetics to ethics. Each invites reflection on what counts as art, who has the right to express, and which forms of heritage merit remembrance. Lace materially fragile yet semantically powerful, becomes a tool for crossing boundaries: between private and public, art and education, past and present. In this sense, NeSpoon’s practice is not only art, but also a politics of presence, visibility, and affirmation.

9. Summary and Conclusions

NeSpoon’s practice demonstrates that the aesthetics of the everyday (ornament, lace, handcraft) can operate as a tool of public art with clear critical potential. Our analysis of murals in Łódź, Belorado, and Fundão shows that lace historically assigned to the private sphere and to women’s work assumes the status of a relational, educational, and political medium that re-values previously sidelined heritage and moves it into the mainstream of visual-culture discourse (Parker 2010; Pollock 1988; Miller 2010; Auther 2010). In this sense lace functions as an agentic ornament: it not only embellishes but communicates memory and identity, binding micro-histories of work to the urban scale of visibility and public deliberation (Gal 2022).

From a site-specific perspective, each mural responded to its concrete context the materiality of place, the street grid, the history of work, and local aesthetic idioms (Kwon 2002; Lefebvre [1974] 1991; de Certeau 1984). Such “situatedness of the work” inserts images into the production of space and the legibility of the city, while enabling dialogicality the co-creation of shared meaning and belonging (Simões et al. 2023).

Within the logic of craftivism, lace becomes a language of care and visibility, operating through relational form, the micro-textures of manual work, and the evocation of intergenerational memory (Greer 2014; Adamson 2007). Studies of public-art interventions likewise indicate how muralism supports the agency of marginalised groups and the recomposition of space in the wake of colonial and settler trajectories (Leahy 2023; Smetzer 2024).

The pedagogical dimension of NeSpoon’s murals aligns with frameworks of public pedagogy and affective education: the images intensify embodied, sensorial experience of place (Barthes 1981; Marks 2002), lower barriers to entry, and transform façades into “open-air classrooms” for practising heritage literacy, critically revisiting the canon and women’s work, and undertaking intercultural activities at neighbourhood scale (Gauntlett 2011; Sandlin et al. 2011). Convergent findings emerge from research on murals and graffiti in the ruins of the Aliko Hotel on Naxos, where in situ art within a temporary, degradation-prone setting created a learning environment catalysing the reading of historical layers, negotiating collective memory, and activating care for heritage among viewer-participants.

With respect to durability and stewardship, textile-ornamental idioms translated onto walls require conservation planning and systematic documentation, e.g., structured recording of mural condition, prevention, monitoring, a need increasingly recognised in public-art conservation research (Mezzadri 2021; Rivaroli et al. 2021).

This study has presented an integrated analytical matrix in which classical iconology meets visual grammar through an “atlas-like comparative montage” an interpretive method of comparative visual mapping designed to link the three cases across spatial, cultural, and aesthetic dimensions. Drawing inspiration from Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas (Haus der Kulturen der Welt & Staatliche Museen zu Berlin 2020) and Didi-Huberman’s (2018) conceptualisation of montage as relational seeing, this approach uses juxtaposition as a form of thinking through images, generating dialogic constellations across contexts. This toolset enabled us to read lace simultaneously as image and as a spatial marker that forges relations between local histories and current urban practices. Our analyses further showed that textile idioms in public art operate as carriers of memory and agency: they recall handwork and the materiality of everyday life while producing a field of visibility for women’s heritage (Parker 2010; Miller 2010; Gal 2022). Finally, we documented the pedagogical potential of such interventions their capacity to initiate informal learning processes outside institutions through affective, embodied experience of city and neighbourhood (Gauntlett 2011; Sandlin et al. 2011; Simões et al. 2023).

We deliberately refrained from conducting local ethnographies and from reconstructing the curatorial backstories of particular projects; this choice opens future research paths. It would be valuable to incorporate triangulated in situ reception studies (on-site audience research) and to examine urban and conservation policies longitudinally in order to capture murals’ “liveliness” over time and their incorporation into heritage-care circuits. Complementary comparisons with contexts of conflict and with Indigenous art could refine our understanding of visual sovereignty and memory negotiation in public space (Leahy 2023; Smetzer 2024).

In conclusion, lace long devalued as “low” craft regains the force of a sign in NeSpoon’s practice. It ceases to be mere ornament and becomes an emblem of cultural change and visual activism grounded in care, memory, and relationality. Public art in this register does not “wallpaper” the city; it teaches us to read it from the scale of the hand to the scale of the neighbourhood.