The Sacred Feminine Behind the Wall - Ona Salvador
Written by Zoe Sharif
Published on January 15th, 2025
It’s golden hour in Houston, Texas, as street artists from around the world congregate for the Buffalo Bayou Mural Festival—the clink-clink of metal peas punctuating the air. A blank wall gleams in the sunlight. Stepping up to the white slab, she flicks her wrist and applies the first stroke of paint. The strong chemical haze rising from the artists’ backs blends with sweet and savory industrial smells. Ona Salvador’s movements along the wall are smooth and graceful, reflecting the soft, grounded spirit of the woman emerging in her piece.
Children play before the mural, dogs weave around the base, and the atmosphere carries the same tenderness and brilliance embodied in ‘Aurora.’ The mural rises like a feeling in the gut—the same mind-body connection an artist shares with her work, and her viewers feel as they meet it. When Salvador steps back to face the finished piece, a sense of seamless connection settles in: artist, artwork, and audience woven into one continuous moment.
Growing up in Barcelona, Spain, Salvador began her career influenced by the city’s vibrant creative culture. Developing her mural practice since 2022, Salvador learned to use spray cans from a friend, picking up skills organically on the streets—a casual beginning that became a pivotal moment in her career. She continued to learn from local artists at numerous community events, particularly graphic arts gatherings and jams.
Having studied illustration in college, she began her artistic career by creating graphic, comic-style art, taking part in both local and international events, and learning from other artists along the way. Through these experiences, she absorbed knowledge about shapes, colors, and a wide range of artistic mediums. Salvador compares discovering the art of graffiti to learning how to translate something into her own visual language. “You can learn a lot just from graffiti letters… I can put that into my own work, understanding how shapes and color work,” she said.
Salvador has always felt an imaginative spark within her, using creativity as a way to “escape” reality as a child. Her artistic development began spontaneously and intuitively, organically molded by her surroundings and personal experiences.
She highlights that it wasn’t until she started painting murals that she truly learned what it meant to express herself. For her, public art isn’t just about projecting a message into the world—it’s about understanding yourself first, so you can understand what message you want to share.
Language in Art
Starting with loose, preliminary sketches, Salvador frequently records ideas as they come—sometimes even on receipts or whatever surface is at hand. From there, she moves to her iPad to develop digital drafts, meticulously planning every detail before beginning a mural and modifying her concepts to suit a particular environment or space. She admits that it requires a certain kind of awareness to realize that sometimes the world isn’t always the best fit for her initial ideas. During the creation process, she allows the concept to develop naturally, taking into account community needs and the site’s unique context. She notes that she connects with some spaces more than others, but believes that
“Even the ugliest spaces can be transformed into something really beautiful—just putting your mark there, and a beautiful face can really change the space.”
Salvador’s work can be described as an exploration of pure feminine form, expressed through murals that channel inner strength, nostalgia, and emotional depth. Her visual language blends illustration with subtle elements that others often describe as “anime-inspired,” though she herself does not identify with that influence. A defining feature of her style is the emphasis on the eyes, which function as a signature technique throughout her practice. The idea that pain can be transformed into a creative and spiritual force is central to much of her work. By highlighting resilience and the capacity to overcome difficulty, her art becomes both a personal and communal form of therapy.
Salvador uses creativity as a way to process personal trauma, translating complex emotions into symbolic visual narratives. She believes that art can “help people go through pain and take the better things from that.” Her process is highly intuitive—she creates from the energetic level of the gut, breathing into that emotional space and letting it guide her movements across a blank wall. She describes her practice as a “soul-level” expression.
From the mosaic floors of ancient synagogues to the cross in Christian iconography, art has always been a means of spiritual communication. Salvador’s murals extend this tradition into the contemporary world. As public artworks, her murals invite shared emotional experiences and empower viewers by foregrounding themes of inner strength and healing.
For Salvador, murals function as portals into deeper facets of the self, holding the potential to “awaken” viewers. The divine feminine—what she refers to as the “sacred feminine”—is a core spiritual concept in her work. Created for the 2025 Hit the North festival in Belfast, her mural ‘Silent Wisdom’ embodies this connection, expressing a link to a mystical inner universe. The piece reflects ideas of generational enlightenment and emotional inheritance, illustrating how the sacred feminine is not exclusive to women but represents universal qualities: intuition, creativity, and compassion.
The “Sacred Feminine”
Salvador’s dedication to emotional authenticity is demonstrated by her credo, “if you feel it, create it.” She understands the “sacred feminine” as an energy rooted in resilience, intuition, and transformative emotional power—an inner force that goes beyond literal representation. Salvador views suffering as a “creative and spiritual force,” a transformational tool. The capacity to transform challenging experiences into art is, for her, a universal but unevenly accessible form of sacred power.
Throughout her practice, Salvador has consistently portrayed feminine figures through soft, organic forms. Her imagery is strength-centered, communicating power without harshness. A magical, almost godlike atmosphere is introduced with elements like floating orbs, blooming flowers, and ethereal shapes, while cool color schemes communicate emotional nuance. Her graphic language creates stories of emotional fortitude, inner power, and vulnerability by striking a balance between spiritual symbols and grounded natural components.
Her recent piece, ‘Calypso,’ offers a clear example of this symbolic approach. The chosen illumination on the figure’s face signifies hope, revelation, and transformation; the eyes, a recurrent focus point in her work, stand for inner wisdom. Salvador uses Calypso, a figure from Greek mythology, to represent the generational transmission of emotion, memory, and identity—a theme that runs throughout her body of work. The spiritual depth Salvador aims to convey revolves around this notion of generational knowledge and emotional inheritance.
Salvador perceives art as a kind of spiritual connection, a call to individuals to discover their own inner fortitude and emotional healing.
In this context, reclaiming feminine holiness in contemporary art functions as a restoration of repressed histories and embodied, intuitive methods of knowing. Graffiti and murals in particular serve as potent venues for this reclamation. In urban environments, these forms create new ways of healing and belonging as well as shared experiences.
Although the sacred feminine is not limited to representations of women, its reappearance in art has historically served as a challenge to patriarchal and colonial aesthetics. Bringing these themes into public space is controversial as it resurfaces erased perspectives into the physical world and reopens questions about who has the authority to define the “sacred.” Salvador is one of several graffiti artists that turn urban settings into places of community, caring, and remembrance. Through their art, disadvantaged bodies are able to reinvent what it means to be spiritually perceived and what is divine.
“But this niche, spiritual thing, I only know a few [artists]. Of course, we are a lot of like sentient, spiritually human beings, but I think it’s very powerful to put it on the streets because it’s a way to connect with [them] and few people will understand exactly. That little niche group and I think it’s so powerful to connect with those people.”
Salvador envisions her work as bringing hope to those who feel lost in the world. She hopes her art empowers people to create their own work as a way of escaping reality and grounding themselves in a chaotic world filled with messiness and madness. The sacred feminine in her art becomes the sunshine we need on cloudy days. Salvador paints her murals and may never see them again, but she knows that people will pass by them on their commutes and find a moment of peace.
“I hope the sun shines more than now in the future for me and for everybody, because there is a lot of bad stuff going on in the world right now, and I hope that everything [gets] better eventually. But if, if it doesn’t, I just want to throw some good energy into the public with my art.”
Zoe Sharif – Born and bred in Queens, New York, Zoe lives at the intersection of street culture, contemporary art, and creative production. With a background in International Criminal Justice, Digital Media & Journalism, her work is shaped by an interest in visual storytelling, public space and the systems that shape how art is communicated and received. She explores creative communities, looking at processes and the ways street-level expression can move between public space and institutional contexts.