Artist Statement

Anna Van Stralen

Anna Van Stralen uses painting to investigate the precarity of human beings in a changeable and sometimes hostile wide context. A key element to much of her work includes exploring the potential for domestic structural fabric to resist or leave traces behind when dismantled. She explores the human constructions and that domestic spaces which can be used as metaphors for inherent fragilities, and the brittle nature of human concerns in the face of social, political and environmental instability and change.

Precarity as a pervasive social force is an ongoing theme in Van Stralen’s work, as well as the relationships of edges, tipping points and areas of abrupt change. The built world provides visual scope to visually explore structures which can balance, tip or tilt, to explore precarity as a continual challenge to communities and cultures.
The domestic and industrial structures of the current age, alongside the human figure and a changeable natural world, have the potential to pictorially unfold nuanced ideas about wider issues like resilience, inequality and imaginative connection. Van Stralen is drawn to stories, in the end, which start with form, but which speak about people.