🌙SALAMISIM (2023)

Writer: Cheryl Quejadas Canning, Sydney. 25 May 2026 a minute read.

Excerpt:

Some paintings begin with clarity, others with a feeling that refuses to leave. Salamisim grew from that quiet pull — a word, a poem, and the fragments that surfaced when I finally stopped to listen.

SALAMISIM (2023)

Some paintings begin with a clear direction. Others begin with a word that lingers long after you’ve read it. Salamisim was one of those — an Ilokano word for reflection that felt less like a definition and more like a familiar state I had been moving through quietly.

Around that time, I was reading Burraga Gutya’s “The Way It Was and Shall Ever Be.” The poem didn’t give me an image. It gave me a shift — a subtle returning to something I thought I had already placed somewhere else. That’s usually how my process starts: not with a picture, but with a feeling that refuses to leave.

Part 1 series of fragmented oil paintings based on a fictional character of the poem "They Way It Was and Shall Ever Be", in the book Yimbama by Burraga Gutya - a poem about love, hope and the cycle of life. Salamisim, 2023 ©Ningjada. Oil on Canvas.

I found myself working in fragments. Not because I wanted to break anything apart, but because that was the only way the feeling arrived. A piece here, a gesture there, something remembered, something unresolved. The story behind these images is neat and close to my heart, but it doesn’t need to be told here. It lives inside the work, and that is enough.

The accompanying collage is simply a trace of that moment — the way the paintings formed while I was sitting with the poem, the word, and the quiet that followed. It isn’t the subject of this entry. It’s just what was beside me while the process was unfolding.

Salamisim reminded me that some paintings don’t begin with clarity. They begin with a quiet insistence — a feeling that returns until you finally give it a place on the canvas.

There is more unfolding in the quiet — but that belongs to the next chapter.