Neža Ema Mikec
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January 9, 1877
Neža Ema Mikec | |
|---|---|
| Born | Agnes Mikec January 9, 1877 Leskovec, Austria-Hungary |
| Died | March 2, 1967 (aged 90) Radovljica, Slovenia |
| Occupation | embroiderer |
Neža Mikec, sister Ema, (9 January 1877 – 2 March 1967) was a Slovenian embroiderer. As a member of the School Sisters of Christ the King, she led the convent embroidery workshop in Maribor and, in collaboration with Helena Kottler Vurnik and Ivan Vurnik, she helped shape 20th-century Slovene ecclesiastical textile art.[1][2]
Neža Ema Mikec was born into a devout family on 9 January 1877 in Leskovec near Novo Mesto.[3] Her mother was the farmer Maria Gričar and her father the farmer Georg Mikec.[3] She first attended primary school in Velika Brusnica, then the convent school of the School Sisters of Notre Dame in Šmihel near Novo Mesto.[1] In Šmihel she also learned embroidery.[1] In 1892 she began attending the private women's teacher-training school of the School Sisters of Christ the King in Maribor.[1]
Work
In 1896 she entered the convent of the School Sisters of Christ the King.[1][2] In 1897 she passed the exam to become a school teacher for lower classes.[1][2] In 1899 she began working in the order's embroidery workshop in Maribor.[4][1][2] Between 1903 and 1904 she refined her technical skills at the applied-arts school of the Sisters of Mary in Vienna.[1] In 1907 she took over management of the Maribor convent embroidery workshop and raised it to a high technical and aesthetic level.[1][2]
The products made in the workshop during the first decade of her leadership display many skillfully employed embroidery techniques, though their aesthetics were not yet fully mature. After World War I she began to collaborate with the artist Helena Kottler Vurnik[5][6] and her husband, the architect Ivan Vurnik.[1][7] Works created in collaboration with them, using simple means, achieved an elemental monumentality.[1] In particular, the appliqué technique, by then largely absent from embroidery, was revived in pieces based on Helena Kottler Vurnik and Ivan Vurnik's designs.[1] A wide range of embroidery techniques was employed.[1] The works produced under Mikec's leadership in the Maribor workshop represent a pinnacle of Slovene embroidery, both for their distinctive artistic conception, unique in world production, and for their exceptionally accomplished technical execution.[1][7]