I start my work with painting or a collage and decompositions of materials and form. Then I investigate what kind of object or total image it can become.
Born in The Hague in 1978, Sandra Keja Planken is a Dutch artist and self-taught author-designer working across textile, glass, objects and installation. Growing up between Spain and The Netherlands shaped her sensitivity to landscape, colour and the ways people form emotional relationships with their surroundings. Her practice moves between art and design, but is not defined by either category. Materials, spaces and bodily experience are brought together to explore the relationship between humans, nature and the instinctive behaviour of both.
Sandra Keja Planken works through tactility. Soft woven forms, glass vessels and immersive environments invite the viewer to experience material through proximity, movement and, where possible, touch. Her objects often have an anthropomorphic or organic character. They can resemble coral, clouds, cellular structures or invented organisms without becoming direct representations. This ambiguity allows the work to operate between familiarity and fantasy.
Textile is approached as a slow and responsive medium. Keja Planken uses knotting, tufting and other labour-intensive processes to build surfaces that feel alive and in transition. Colour is not applied as decoration; it helps create rhythm, emotional temperature and the suggestion of growth. In glass, the apparent hardness of the material is balanced by forms that appear soft, inflated or fluid. Across media, she is interested in contradiction: weight and lightness, humour and vulnerability, abstraction and bodily recognition.
Nature's Visual Sound, developed for Amsterdam Art Week in collaboration with TextielLab, brought these concerns together in a large-scale interactive installation made entirely from leftover yarns. Cotton, wool, mohair and recycled PET were transformed into hanging and knotted elements that encouraged movement and touch. The work connected sensory pleasure with questions of material value, reuse and ecological interdependence.
Sandra Keja Planken creates limited editions, wall works, vessels, public installations and spatial interventions. Her practice responds to a visual culture that is increasingly fast and emotionally distant by making room for softness, attention and physical encounter. NewHouse Gallery presents Sandra Keja Planken in Amsterdam. Browse available works by Sandra Keja Planken and explore her exhibition history.