Threads of Tradition: Sandra Junele Weaves Generations of Ancestral Sustainability into Contemporary Form
Textile artist Sandra Junele doesn’t just craft bespoke wall art—she breathes new life into discarded material, creating sculptural compositions that carry the weight of memory, sustainability, and generational knowledge. Working with textile waste sourced from local manufacturers, Junele’s practice is rooted in a reverence for resourcefulness, one passed down through her Latvian heritage and expressed through an aesthetic that is both modern and timeless.
Raised in Latvia, Junele grew up surrounded by acts of making—an ecosystem of familial creativity in which sustainability was not a slogan, but a necessity woven into everyday life. These early experiences continue to inform her work, transforming inherited values into tactile, contemporary artworks. Rather than replicating traditional motifs, Junele distills the essence of her upbringing—the quiet discipline of craft, the ethics of reuse—into minimalist, meditative wall panels.
Her process is meticulous. Textile remnants are sorted by colour, untangled, and stripped of synthetic fibres. Once purified, the fibres are blended with a biodegradable, plant-based glue—her own alchemical mix—which is then spread and dried into a pliable, cardboard-like material. From here, she hand-cuts and layers each sheet into compositions rich with texture and tonal variation. The result is abstract, sculptural, and serenely balanced—works that invite touch as much as they invite contemplation.
"My practice is intuitive," Sandra explains, "but it’s grounded in deep preparation. I spend days just handling the fibres in silence. That act becomes a form of meditation.” These quiet, repetitive gestures—sifting, sorting, shaping—become part of the final work, imbuing each piece with an inner stillness. Junele speaks often of this mindfulness, not as a trend but as a fundamental rhythm of her creative life.
Though her methods diverge from traditional weaving, Junele’s sensibility remains deeply connected to the past. Her family history is rich with craft: her aunts were seamstresses; her mother, a knitter and crocheter; her grandfather, a resourceful builder who constructed furniture from forest-found wood and hand-wove baskets from gathered plants. She recalls one such basket—firm, resilient, and made with loving precision—used for picnics with her mother. “He had what we call ‘golden hands’,” she says, a reverence echoing in her own attention to detail.
Yet Junele’s work resists nostalgia. Her pieces are not about replication but reinterpretation. The traditions she honours are not fixed forms but values: ingenuity, patience, and care for one’s environment. Each piece is made entirely from what she has on hand, dictated by the hues and textures of the moment. “I only ever work with what I have,” she says. “Each piece responds to the colours available to me. Nothing is pre-planned—it’s a conversation with the material.”
Junele’s pieces remain untitled, an intentional gesture that leaves interpretive space open for the viewer. “I want people to connect with the work on their own terms,” she explains. This openness mirrors her ethos of sustainable creation: to offer not prescriptive statements, but invitations—quiet provocations for slower looking, deeper feeling.
While some of her larger panels possess natural sound-absorbing qualities, Sandra chooses not to highlight this feature, at least for now. Her focus lies elsewhere: in the tactile intimacy of craft, in the poetic dialogue between past and present, and in the environmental resonance of creating something biodegradable—yet lasting.
Though the materials she uses may break down over time, their emotional and aesthetic presence feels enduring. In this way, Sandra Junele’s work offers a quiet counterpoint to the fast pace of mass production. It is not just sustainable—it is sustaining. By threading ancestral knowledge through contemporary form, her art becomes both a preservation of memory and a blueprint for mindful futures.
“People are unique,” she says. “Our homes should be too.” In this belief, and in each textured panel, lies a commitment not only to sustainability, but to living with intention—honouring the past while making space for what comes next.
