Ivona Pelajić is a Croatian visual artist and designer,  living and working in Sweden and Germany.
In 2010 Pelajić graduated from the Fine Arts Academy in Zagreb (mag. art) and in 2020 she gained her second degree, MFA in Child Culture Design at HDK-Valand, GU, Sweden.
In 2020 she co-founded studio Mono/Mint, together with Fredrik Stjernqvist. The duo works with different co-creating and art tools (from sound to painting to wood) in order to create play installations for children and adults in urban environment.
Since 2022 member of HDLU (Croatian Association of Fine Artists).


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ARTIST STATEMENT


I am a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, installations, and public art, with a practice moving between the material and the ephemeral, personal and participatory. My work engages with memory, perception, and the imagination, drawing on symbols and geometries found in nature to reveal hidden correspondences between inner and outer worlds. Motifs such as underground root systems and plant auras serve as metaphors for unseen energies, emotional imprints, and the interconnectedness of systems.
While painting with acrylics remains central to my process, my practice expands to include participatory elements. My work captures the subtle energies of plants and built environments, translating their embedded memories and atmospheres into painted form. The motifs and ideas that surface on canvas frequently overflow into collaborative spaces where they take new forms through dialogue and co-creation. Since 2020, I have collaborated with Fredrik Stjernqvist under the name Mono/mint, creating installations from natural materials that invite play, tactile discovery, and collective imagination. These projects are designed not only for children but with children as active collaborators, transforming symbolic imagery into lived, shared experiences that animate public spaces.
Through both painting and participatory practice, I explore how ephemeral experiences leave traces in the material world: as memories, symbols, the auras of plants and architectural spaces, or as invisible structures that shape perception and connect us to one another. Whether working alone with brush and canvas or collectively through installation, both approaches serve the same fundamental inquiry: making visible the unseen networks that bind us to our environments and to each other. In solitary painting, I excavate the hidden life of spaces; in collaboration, I invite others to participate in that discovery, creating temporary communities around shared wonder. Together, these practices form a continuous investigation into the permeable boundaries between self and world, memory and present moment, individual vision and collective imagination.