Neža Agnes Momirski

I was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia. My education in arts goes far back when I was still a little kid. I started doing sculpture in a class with a Slovene artist when I was 7 years old. My mom is an architect, just like my grandfather. I traveled a lot around Europe with her in my early years. My dad was an inventor and laser show artist. He passed away when I was 12. The most time I spent as a kid doing art was with my grandma. She used to be a geography teacher, and she would always tell stories about traveling around the world, where she had been, what happened there, how it is there, who she met. Those stories made me wonder and fantasize how the world was, and opened my imagination.

I was changing my mind a lot in my teenage years about what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wanted to be a jewelery designer, painter, writer, sculptor. All these years I was still doing sculpture, since I was 13 with another artist in a class called Design of Human Portrait and Body. After high-school, I continued in the Sculpture department at the Academy for Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana. After one year there, I got a bit tired of classical sculpture, so I went to study at Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. My goal was to combine the knowledge and skill I gained over years with my thoughts, which seemed the logical step further, to satisfy the need in me to change, grow, experience. It took me a year to get to know the system of schools in Holland. Completely different than in Ljubljana. It was hard, not easy in the beginning, to just go live in a different country where you don't know the language, way of living, have no friends. What I like here are the many opportunities within the art scene, a lot of art events going on everywhere you go, and people are open-minded. I met Reno last year, and we started cooperating with each other. I love what we do together. Besides that, I work a lot on my own projects. And I still have two more years to go before I finish school. My goals are to exhibit in galleries, and being able to create, create, create, to amaze myself and others.

I love to draw, and everything I do has a story behind it. I love storytelling. Drawing for me is fragile and delicate, what I enjoy is the intimate world of lines and paper types. It's important to me, how the paper feels to the  touch. Combining elements of drawing you would not expect, to give the lively dynamics, contrast, to form the tension on paper, the depth reached with perspective, that pulls you in. I still sculpt, lately out of wax. Small sculptures, forming weird compositions and containing the idea behind them, I play with the body form, and sometimes take photographs of them, which then becomes a form by itself. I write a lot of poetry, and so I like to write scripts for videos too. Telling a story. The absurdness of being. That comes out of my fascination of being on stage and performing theatrically. Monologues with myself.

I have a lot of people I look up too, poets, conceptual artists, writers, designers, film makers. I take the elements I like, mostly subconsciously, that inspire me esthetically and I work with them. I think it's the most beautiful when you see the love someone puts into their work. When it becomes personal, and not cliche. And when those esthetics serve the idea behind it. When form is a consequence of a concept. When writing is intimate, honest, revealing pain and joy, Eros - Tanatos, imaginative and real.

I always find inspiration in myself. In relations with other people, observing emotions, existential questions. I like theatricality, drama, existentialism, Jung, dreams. I like growing with my concepts, developing them, but I easily get stuck rotating around the same point, just because I get deep in it, so I need to step back and review it from a distance. I have learned to do that through the process, not afterwards.

Living and working together with another person can be very inspiring. We like to do projects together, and we tried in the past as well, to combine drawing and photography, but this time we both had our own space to grow, to express our own thoughts, within a frame that brings the work together again. This particular frame was an idea of observing each other for a month, with many rules, within which, like it or not, you had to work. The most beautiful part of all is, when you see the works come together. It was hard to not get feedback for a month from the person you always talk to about your work. And find the strength in yourself to say, this is good now, this I still need to work on.

As might be expected, this is very personal work, that reveals many sides of a person opposite to you. How I felt about him, what I observed, I've put on paper. All the little details you can only see when you get to know the person.

This project/book means a lot to me. I've grown in my work, I never really used color before, and now if I don't, I miss it. I pushed myself every day to discover something new in myself, new technical elements to work with. I realized I need strict rules, that strangely, give me the freedom to create. This was one exhausting, but joyful month, to the point when we showed our work to each other, and we just kept on smiling while looking at it.

Any advice?

Simple is the best. Simple is effective and clear. In form, composition and idea. It's reachable, and understandable. I follow that, and sometimes I should do that more, since I tend to wrap my thoughts into complicated heavy concrete blocks.

Get yourself a hero, and follow them, all the way, but later also choose a moment when you start being yourself all the way. That is an important moment, when the test is whether you really believe in yourself.

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