Luna van der Straaten (b. 2001) is a visual artist based in Amsterdam, NL. Her

practice investigates the human need to impose structure on a fundamentally

ungraspable world. Through painting, printmaking and casting, she explores how

systems such as religion, science and language attempt to impose order on

uncertainty. These systems offer ways to navigate and make sense of the world. Yet

they also set boundaries. They determine what can be seen, named or understood.

Rather than resolving this tension, she uses it as a driving force within her practice.

Van der Straaten’s research takes shape through painting, asemic writing and plaster

casting. Painting is a space where she freely assembles different systems of meaning,

combining archival and personal images with drawings. By doing so, new

connections emerge, shifting meaning and narrative. Asemic writing resembles

language but resists fixed meaning, exposing both the authority and fragility of

linguistic structures. It functions as a method to test how meaning is constructed,

keeping interpretation open.

Alongside painting, plaster works introduce processes of casting, engraving and

fossilising. These gestures refer to ancient forms of inscription, as well as to the

desire to preserve and stabilise what is inherently unstable.

By bringing together material, image and language, her work inhabits the space

where systems of meaning begin to shift, overlap and lose certainty.