Ninin Damayanti

I paint on my kitchen floor in Sumatra, sharing the tiles with a whistling tea kettle, six rescue cats that regularly step on wet paint, and whatever sanity survived decades of newsroom deadlines and corporate boardrooms.

​After a twenty-five-year hiatus from art, and a former life spent chasing in-depth stories and nodding at growth metrics in glass towers, I returned to the canvas in 2026. The reason was practical. Paint is considerably more polite than people. Pigment never demands a quarterly review, and deep cadmium red has never once scheduled a 9 AM status meeting.
​
My primary tool for building the heavy textures in the Inherited Structures series is an expired 2019 supermarket loyalty card that originally promised discounts on dish soap. Its chipped plastic edge turned out to be exceptionally good at scraping impasto and disturbing rigid boundaries. Far more useful than its original purpose at the checkout counter. The surfaces are thick, scarred, and layered, bearing an uncanny resemblance to the taped-up instant noodle boxes I spent a lifetime hauling between rented houses.
​
There is no cosmic enlightenment or curated wellness journey here. I paint simply because on this piece of cloth, I am the one who decides where t...

Bachelor of Social Science