Meet the artist: Sandrena GuesT-Koning

Artist Statement

Sandrena Koning is a mixed-media artist, digital designer, and photographer based in West Texas. Her work emerges from the delicate tension between resilience and fragility. She creates layered, textural compositions that blur the boundaries between abstraction and surrealism, blending sculptural media, acrylics, and digital tools to evoke memories, places, and perceptions.

Guided by intuition and experimentation, Sandrena often explores the interplay between nature and the human-made world, the transformation of decay into rebirth, and the relationship between science and spirit. She highlights the elegance found in imperfection, revealing the often-overlooked beauty inherent in both the natural world and its remnants. Through her work, she invites viewers to examine the spaces where beauty clings to imperfection and deeper stories emerge through texture, shadow, light, and personal transformation.

After a rare cancer diagnosis in 2023, Sandrena's artistic practice became more personal, honoring art as a healing language and a bridge to ancestral memory. Her current work aims to express what often remains unspoken: grief, identity, wonder, and the complex layers of existence.

Meet the Artist

Sandrena Guest-Koning was born in Anchorage, Alaska, and raised amidst the remnants of Detroit’s industrial past. Surrounded by abandoned buildings and forgotten spaces, she became fascinated with these locations, discovering beauty in their layered surfaces, patina, and unexpected flashes of color hidden within the haunting wreckage. This early exposure sparked a lifelong love for texture and transformation, which continues to inform her work today.

Now based in rural West Texas, Sandrena is a mixed-media artist, designer, and photographer. She creates dimensional, surreal compositions that communicate through layers, blending intuition, experimentation, and personal experience. Her artistic practice is rooted in transformation, utilizing unconventional materials to reflect the resilience found in nature. These elements manifest as sculpted forms, layered paints, weathered textures, and digital fragments. Through her work, she tells stories that connect the internal and external worlds, exploring the complexities of the human psyche, the persistence of memory, and the interplay between the decayed and the reborn.

In 2023, Sandrena was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer known as Low-Grade Appendiceal Mucinous Neoplasm. This diagnosis and her subsequent recovery journey prompted an extended break from her artistic practice. Still, it also reshaped her approach to art. During this period of reflection, she began to view art as a tool for healing, self-discovery, and ancestral connection. Now, with renewed clarity, her work honors the body, the broken, and the beauty that emerges from both.

Her evolving series delves into themes of grief, memory, and the connections between generations. These deeply personal pieces are inspired by the loss and passing of her biological father, whom she never met, and the paternal lineage she recently uncovered. Her art bridges between what was lost and what still exists, between silence and expression, and between layers of time.

Sandrena’s work has been exhibited in regional art shows, juried competitions, and collaborative exhibitions. It has also been featured in the APÉRO CATALOGUE | Fine Art Collection. She is pursuing a Bachelor of Design in Digital Multimedia Design at Penn State, where she continues merging analog processes with digital fluency, expanding the visual boundaries and language of her work and storytelling.

Through Koning Art & Photography, she invites others to explore the liminal space where stories unfold, resilience is expressed through layers, beauty emerges, and healing takes the form of creation.