Every healing begins with a heresy.


To heal a wound, you must first look at it. But the first time something buried rises, it splits you open. It’s kriss-sharp, blood-wet, older than language. It rolls in from nowhere and everywhere, flooding you, claiming you.

That’s where Satya Cipta paints from.

A Balinese born in Lombok, Satya is a fiercely original artist whose work resists categorization. A painter, poet, performer – and recently, a singer touring with the National Indonesian Orchestra in Europe as lead vocalist – she inhabits all art forms with raw grace and aching beauty. But it’s her eerie paintings that grip me most.

Her canvases centre around the female figure – sometimes her own, sometimes a vessel for something ancestral or unseen. Movement ripples through strands of hair, curling mists, stems of flowers. Most of her work is dark elegance in monochrome, punctuated by a single, deliberate red – at times the sole blooming of colour in a mouth, a pair of feet, elegant female hands, or the slick edge of a blade.

‘It just moves through me, I’m not there when I paint.’

She paints what can’t be said: those pulsing fragments of experiences that escape neat rational definitions. It’s hard to stay indifferent looking at Satya’s painting. You feel a blushing satisfaction, each canvas detonating inside you in the most ridiculously delicate way.

Where we sit, the breeze drifts through the open bale, playing with her long black hair. There’s a charge to her stillness, something wild in waiting. Satya is wearing all white, a slash of red senteng at her waist. She is her own paintings come to life. And yet, beside all that curled-up wilderness, there’s an openness to her. Low-lit. Steady. It’s in the way she listens. In the sudden bursts of laughter. I soften without meaning to. 

Her work makes space for what women have learned to hide, and there’s a cost to breaking what was bound in silence. You risk becoming the problem just by naming it; be called dramatic, dangerous, disloyal.

Satya’s been called all that and more. She speaks of disapproval, of being seen as unnecessarily disruptive. In Bali, harmony is everything. In the name of tradition and communal well-being, individual discomfort is assumed to come secondary. This centuries-old instinct protects the whole in the long run and on all levels. A deep-seated survivalist intelligence wired for preservation, and suspicion of change is part of its defence.

Satya speaks of the way women sometimes look away or worse, look too critically. “Some women see me as a rival,” Satya says. But listen closely: this rivalry is not rooted in hatred. This is a rival who could have been an ally, if the world were safer.

And in an unsafe world, strong women learn to connect by giving. By offering what was never given to them. Satya calls it her duty. When I ask her what an ideal, balanced world looks like, she doesn’t hesitate: “A world where everyone feels safe and protected.” Women being part of that everyone.

But this is earth, not heaven. And here, there is always a shadow.

Some of us have learned to mould ourselves to it accordingly, by performing what is acceptable, by softening the truth. The silence and the smile became our armour, passed from mother to daughter, polished over time. We are fluent in restraint.

Satya’s paintings heal by removing the restraints. By reminding us of the hidden we have neatly put away. Her work holds many baffling polarities, as does she. One moment childlike, the next, formidable. She is petal and blade. Through her art, she allows the feminine to be delicate and overwhelming, ecstatic and furious, pure and perverse. Her figurative work is precise, unflinching. Nothing is hidden, and that’s what disturbs.

I ask why the world is so afraid of women, and she smiles: “Because women are like death – natural, but terrifying.”

And if you’re drawn to her, you already know this. You’ve felt the same tension beneath your skin; something true pressing up against what’s expected. A violent truth about to erupt.

She owns this fire. She paints her feet and hands red. Turns off the light. And whispers: “Darkness, heal me”.