Sandra Keja Planken

Sandra Keja Planken examines the relationship between people, nature and material at a time when visual culture is becoming faster, more polished and more emotionally distant. Growing up between the emotional openness of Spain and the more reserved culture of the Netherlands, she became fascinated by the ways people experience, express and connect with the world around them.

By slowing traditional textile techniques down and translating them into amorphous sculptural work, she builds a tactile visual language centred on softness, transformation and perception. Her woven passementerie tapestries and glass sculptures move between organism, memory, nature and emotional landscape, drawing on underwater worlds, coral systems, sea grasses and ecosystems in transformation.

Textile functions as a vessel for memory, vulnerability and human connection; glass introduces a complementary language, a material that catches light, transforms it, and at the same time tries to embody softness. Nature is not represented, she says, but experienced.

Within GROUND, Sandra Keja Planken shows how softness, materiality and sensory presence can take physical form for what normally stays unseen. Her practice meets the season's central question in reverse: not what allows the ground to hold, but what allows something to come into form upon it.

Not the final image but the conditions that make form possible. The silence before form, the layer of feeling before language. Where other makers in this season excavate a personal or material ground, Keja Planken constructs one — slowly, by hand, from what has already been used, worn or discarded.