Little definitive documentation is available on the artist Salem Sampoerna. She is a highly reclusive and secretive individual and cultivates an enigmatic persona. She rarely engages in contact with a world outside her own creation. Sampoerna never grants interviews nor allows art world professionals into her studio. There are currently no photographic images of her on record.

It is said that she divides her time between a secluded cabin in Michigan and a hidden studio on the Island of Java. Most believe that she is in her early to mid-sixties and began making her artwork after the death of her husband some twenty-odd years ago.

She refers to her collages as “abstract weavings.” These works are torn from contemporary printed sources and blend Eastern and Western sensibilities as well as Modern art concerns with more traditional folk art customs, such as the quilting motif.

By quilting found imagery Sampoerna abstracts the representations originally intended to convey some narrative meaning and reveals to us “a tapestry behind the image as language.” Sampoerna claims that there is a “spiritual architecture” to be discovered in her abstractions. She feels they represent “a universe that is woven unseen” within our own everyday world.