There are recurring depictions of fantastical creatures, humans-animal and human-plant hybrids in close interrelations in Murni’s body of work. Their prevalence could be attributed to Murni’s sleep habits, as she may have been a lucid dreamer.
Her partner Edmoundo Zanolini describes her interactivity during REM sleep [or in a trance]:
“She would eventually have a dream and start talking. I would be next to her, and I could talk and ask her about it, and so on. She would continue to sleep, yet be interactive—meaning she would reply to me in her sleep. She was absolutely coherent.”
As Murni allows her unconscious to take the lead in her amalgamated illogical scenes with strange creatures, she brings alive the conditions of her dreams to reality.
In Untitled (1999), previously showcased at the 58th Carnegie International, Murni liberates sensuous curves from a decidedly anthropomorphic or corporeal subject, opting instead to conjoin the abstract totem with fern-like ornamentation. The paintings depicts feminine sexuality without the voyeuristic passivity of the traditional female nude. By painting herself as an entity morphing into an animal or plant in close embrace with others, Murni dances around the issue of the life force being omnipresently and essentially sexual. In what is perhaps her main contribution to women and humanity as a whole, these male-less paintings show the world that women can own, enjoy, and be sustained by sexual ecstasy, both with a partner and without.