Bali Echo Magazine Edition 52 | Biography of the female body

turns up represented asan assorted dishevelment of vines and bowels. No birth Murni is barren. So in her paintings, Murni tells "everything" about love, even what is never told in classy magazine such as Bali Echo. Murni paints more than sex, however. She paints life. And the objects and events that are her daily companions.

All are treated and deformed at the whim of her imagination. With a natural simplicity In fact, seen from their titles and actual, if metaphoric content, what Murni is showing us is herself, in her environment and all the aspects of her femininity. She paints an ordinary world in an extraordinary way. Murni carries in her mind and work a symbolic world that would be interesting to analyze in depth in its multilevel meanings. Watches, mustaches, tubercules identify the male, while flowers the female. A bluntly W'as

great, much better thanthe big think the others brought. We follow the narrow path, which had become rockier and steeper.
The first section had been past vegetables fields and forests (as l saw more Cleary on the way down), but we were now on rocks and at times needed our hand to scramble up. At one point the path cleared an we could stop to look back and enjoy the view of the lights way down below. It's fantastic looking back, seeing the lights of the towns and villages below. There were villages almost every where. suddenly, something strange happened. A gamelan band struck up way off to our left. It sounded not so near, but not so far either. Impossible to know on the millennium it floated clearly through the cool night air. it was about two o'clock in the morning. I asked the others what village it was

comingfrom. "There's no village there, came the brief replay. I persisted asking if people were hiking over there (with a full band) or if could be a radio.

No-one said too much and we turned around to continue the climb. the music must have stopped or l did not notice it any more. It was only when we got back that ari and his brother Dwi told me of the stories from Merbabu. The gamelan music comes from spirits who lure unsuspecting hikers towards the sound as if in a trance. They leave the path and are never seen again. That explained why they were so reticent at the time. This is similar to another story, whereby a beautiful maiden lures hypnotized men to their deaths by leading them over cliffs. Entirely more plausible. Ari and Dwi told me many fascinating stories later when we were back in Salatiga. He later recounted that at one point when we, were crossing a little stream, jumping from stone to stone, one of our group slipped and got a foot in the water.Nothing remarkable, but Ari said he saw a ghostly apparition pull on Bagus' shoulder putting him off balance. It was an old man he saw vanishing into the forest.

Why the spirit picked on the clumsiest member l don't know. We made it up to Post Four, which isn't too far from the summit and camped down to get some hot food and some sleep. We had passed aew people on the way, the friendly Javanese greeting each other with "monggo

monggo" and afew words of conversation. Another group of men had already camped down and were getting some shut eye. As soon as l stopped l felt cold and tired. l put on all my clothes and shivered as Ari cooked noodles in his T-shirt and shorts. After some food l tried to get some sleep and got about an hour of craved sleep before being given a nudge. "Do you still want to go the top?" Well, of course l did. Three of us set off in the cold technique and manner. Her painting is at the opposite from the narrative, tightly patterned, repetitive manner of most of the Balinese painters among whom she works. A painter trained in Pengosekan, she revitalizes. the visual and thematic language of Bali's village painting. Why and how does one become Murni? In a way as simple and full of surprises as are her works. Murni (34) was born "Ni Gusti Ayu Murniasih" in a small village in the Jembrana Regency in Western Bali. Her father was a peasant and spoor, and

she pent her first years in the mud looking after the ducksA little Balinese girl, running naked about the family yard and bathing at sunset in the nearby stream. But no dance, no music and no art. And school only until the age of 12.By that time, Murni's family was so poor that they decided to follow the government's transmigration programmed to Sulawesi, where the Balinese had set up communities in the previous decades.

Her father sold every thing and the family moved. Sulawesi didn't bring wealth, and soon Murni found herself the "pembantu" maid-servant) of a Chinese family from the city of Ujung Pandang. "They were nice," she says, "they tried to put me through school, and I walked 5 kilometers every day to go there." Also while in Sulawesi Murni came across the first "mustache" of her life: an army man. "l loved him and his mustache," she recalls with glittering eyes, "but l didn't like it (referring to her first sexual intercourse with the man)." When her Chinese family settled in Jakarta, she followed them. There, she learned sewing and became her boss's trusted helping hand. They have remained friends until today. Murni, however, wanted to return. to Bali.She came back in 1987 and soon found a job with a jeweler from Celuk. There she started testing her creativity. "l wanted to create jewelswith different forms," she says, and did so. A favorite worker, intelligent and witty