Sandra Keja Planken

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Sandra Keja Planken, featured in AQ Volume VII, creates work on how the state of mind shifts. As described by Stirpad Magazine: “Sandra creates work about how moods are constantly changing, similar to the materials and forces of nature. While her entities invite you to participate rather than merely look at them. They are a call for open-mindedness and sensory engagement. Her objects are more than static forms: they are dynamic entities designed to evoke tactile, visual, and emotional responses.” They are an appeal for open-mindedness and sensory engagement. Sandra’s works are about humans, nature, and human nature. Contemporary tapestry, textile art, glass, object, and spatial design with an anthropomorphic quality.

She is currently showing her art installation Nature’s Visual Sound at Amsterdam Art and preparing some of these installation parts to actually become living and breathing art pieces underwater to host new life and corals.

Over the past five years, Keja Planken’s works have been exhibited in innovative galleries such as her own Messmerizing Gallery, The Millenhouse Gallery Amsterdam, Rhett Baruch Gallery Los Angeles, Isola Gallery Milano, and NewHouse Gallery Amsterdam, as well as museums and fairs around the world. Highlights include PAN Amsterdam with Atkris, Amsterdam Art with NewHouse Gallery, Rhett Baruch Gallery in Los Angeles, Collectible in Brussels, the Huidenclub x Elle Decor show, DesignBiennale Rotterdam x Elle Decor, Dutch Design Week, Salone del Mobile, and the museum show Makerssecrets at the National Textile Museum. She gets to experiment and create at these Dutch museum institutes, the Dutch National Glass Museum and the Dutch Textile Museum, while they donate their remnant yarns and glass shards to her.

Before focusing fully on art and sculptural design pieces, she ran her interior and spatial design studio, Noun, for 15 years, transforming old or forgotten spaces into immersive environments with recycled materials. These boring colossuses and public spaces, soulless buildings, and abandoned industrial warehouses she transformed into vibrant human connections. She also worked for Greenpeace to create art and creative campaigns. After a pivotal accident in 2019, she shifted focus to her own artistic foundation, working sculpturally with textiles, glass, and mixed media. Today, she lives and works in Amsterdam in her lush green studio and home, co-parenting two children and married to Job Keja.


Artist Statement

I imagine a world where art breathes underwater,
Where sculpted forms drift like memory,
Woven from the remnants of waste and wonder,
Where what was once discarded becomes sacred.

Beneath the surface,
My sculptures reach not only toward the eye,
But toward life itself.
They invite coral and other life to settle,
Algae to bloom,
And stories to root in silence.

Each thread, each curve, each shard of glass and textile,
Is a gesture of repair,
A promise to the ocean that we still remember her voice and rhythm,
That beauty can also be useful,
That stillness can seed change.

This is not just art or design for the eye,
It is a habitat,
A ritual,
A voice beneath the waves,
Speaking of resilience, renewal, and return.


https://www.instagram.com/sandrakejaplanken_noun/