Sandra Junele

The practice

Artist profile

Sandra Junele creates large wall-based works from recovered textile matter. Her surfaces can appear restrained and architectural from a distance, yet close looking reveals compressed fibres, hand-sewn rope, shifting texture and the irregular evidence of their earlier lives.

With a background in interior and textile design, she understands how scale, tactility and shadow can change the atmosphere of a room. Repetition and disciplined composition bring coherence to materials that begin in fragmented or inconsistent form. The work does not disguise waste; it gives that instability a new visual structure.

Junele’s practice makes material awareness unusually direct. What has been discarded is neither romanticised nor treated as a novelty. It becomes the substance of a rigorous contemporary language, one that asks viewers to reconsider the value assigned to fibres, labour and the objects surrounding everyday life.

Methods and evidence

Sustainability and practice

Junele works with recycled industrial and consumer textile waste, combining shredded fibres with a handmade plant-based binder. The process creates mouldable material for panels and sculptural surfaces, allowing offcuts and discarded yarn to re-enter use in a materially different form.

Her approach also values hand skill, repairability and long-term material knowledge. Slow construction resists the speed and uniformity of mass production, while the binder has been developed so the fibre can be reworked rather than permanently fixed beyond recovery. The sustainability case rests on a documented material loop and careful making, not simply on the visual appearance of natural texture.