Ipeh Nur

Seperti Laut yang Gelap dan Misterius (Like a Dark and Mysterious Sea), 2023

Since 2019, Ipeh Nur has been investigating Indonesian maritime cultures, culminating in vivid and immersive murals, illustrations, and installations. The artist gathers materials from each site—soil, mud, stones, shells, and hand-produced pigments such as crushed eggshells and powdered red brick—weaving the landscape into a visual language rooted in lived experience. In this work visitors can step inside her world: a cave where she sheds the shadow of prohibition and carves out a space of her own. The cave is covered in naturally dyed canvases evoking the Yoni, a Hindu-Buddhist female symbol, paying tribute to the traditional belief in the coastal communities of Mandar and Java that the sea is a woman. This still space holds Nur’s memories of a boat-making ritual involving a Padewakang—which Makassar sailors used to reach Australia before 1770, as recorded in cave paintings—and her own journeys with local fishermen. She places these encounters alongside her experiences navigating maritime societies, in which the role of women remains largely unspoken. Ancient mark-making and living memory drew Nur to Leang Bulu’ Sipong, one of the oldest known cave painting sites, within the Maros-Pangkep karst landscape of South Sulawesi, a conservation zone encircled by extractive mining. Pulling on these experiences, she recovers a world before borders, where the sea was a network of exchange, migration, and kinship stretching from the archipelago to Australia and beyond. With its ancient routes buried beneath colonial geographies and extractive industry, Nur quietly insists we do not forget this deep connective tissue between peoples, continents, and cosmologies.

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