I would like to thank my many supporters , textile enthusiasts all, for coming to my show and selecting our finest work. The koi scarf pictured above sold out the first day. We had enough of the jacquard silk to make only 12 pieces, but we are currently searching for more of the same cloth, or something similar so we can produce the same design again. I will be producing my annual December sale again this year and hope to have the koi scarf again.
Most of my time in Indonesia is spent working on batik, but at last I was able to get away for 10 days of rest and relaxation, this time to a part of Indonesia that I have not seen before, the Alor archiplago.
Not many people venture east of Bali, or the next island eastward, Lombok. There are however many interesting islands further east. The larger islands such as Sumbawa, Flores, Solor, and Lomblen all have smaller islands around them. An Indonesian friend recently recommended Alor for it’s pristine coral reefs and abundant sea life.
It is a fairly small island with a capitol city, Kalibashi, of only about 20,000 inhabitants. It can be reached by boat from Flores, or by air from Kupang, Timor. At one time it was densely forested with sandalwood trees, but they were long ago depleted by the Dutch. Most of the inhabitants are rural subsistence farmers, growing corn on steep mountain sides. It is one of the poorest provinces in all of Indonesia where the per capita income is less than $100. The population is divided equally between Muslims, Catholics, and Protestants, who seem get along very well.
Bahasa Alor is the predominant language spoken, although most younger people can speak Bahasa Indonesia. There are many subdialects of Bahasa Alor, some spoken by as few as 750 people.
There is a tradition of weaving on the islands, especially the island of Ternate which can be reached by baot from Alor. A coarse thread is hand spun from locally grown cottn and dyed with indigo and other natural dyes made from local ingredients. The threads are tied and dyed before the are woven on sinple back-styrap looms, to produce the traditional turtle, squid, butterfly, and lizard designs on sarongs.
During my annual textile bazaar I have the opportunity to meet many people who love textiles. Sometimes they bring me a piece to see. This year a young design student from the Academy of Art in San Francisco brought an amazing H’mong story cloth, made by his aunt who lives in a refugee camp in Thailand. I had seen examples of this type of textile before in the morning market in Vientiane, but never before have I seen one as large and as beautifully crafted as this one. The student’s name is Billy Vang, born in North Carolina where there is a large community of H’mong people who emigrated to the US after the Vietnam war. The H’mong are an ethnic group in SE Asia who live in the mountainous regions of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand. He maintains close contact with his family there and wants to preserve and promote his heritage by telling the story of the H’mong by way of their textiles. He would also like to help improve their standard of living by introducing and promoting their cultural heritage, especially through their textiles. As a student of fashion design, he hopes to incorporate some of their design motif into his work.
The H’mong call their textile art “paj ntaub” (pronounced pa-dao) meaning “flower cloth”, a reference to the many bright colors used like flowers in a field. The story cloth is an adaptation of traditional embroidery techniques used on clothing. They are a product of the refugee experience where often the H’mong were not permitted to wear their traditional clothing. It provided a way for them to reflect on their experience, tell the story of their persecution and suffering, and also assert their identity and express their traditional values of family and village life.
Joua Xiaong who created this piece is in her early thirties and has lived most of her life in the Ban Nam Yao Refugee Camp in Nan Province, Thailand. She created two identical story cloths; the sister to this piece is in the Childrens’ Museum of Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
The verb for taking out the wax from a batik is “lorod”. It is the most exciting step of a long process. Making a multi-colored cloth requires many dye bath immersions. Each new area of color is then covered with wax, so it’s easy to forget what colors are underneath by the third or fourth application of wax. One only hopes that the contrast between colors is strong enough to show the detail of the designs applied with the canting.
The last color bath for this batik was the blue on the border and some of the flowers. It is ready to be immersed in the boiling water bath to remove the wax and reveal the final results.
The batik cloth is immersed in boiling water and lift out with a smooth stick and held over the cauldron a few seconds to allow the melted wax to run off before it is plunged again into the water. this is repeated many times until the cloth is free of wax.
It has been three weeks already since I arrived in Central Java and the cultural immersion has been intense. I jumped right into the daily routine of batik making the very next day after I arrived. I learn more and more each day about each step of the process, especially the chemistry of coloring. Hartono who manages the workshop is currently responsible for most of the coloring. It is a skill that is highly guarded and can only be acquired by trial and error. Many things can affect the results from reactive dyes such as the weather, the water, the type of cloth, and the quality of the dyestuff. Many pieces were already in various stages of completion when I arrived; so Hartono had to bring me up to date with production.
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This scarf is one of his own designs. The first color has already been covered with wax. In this photo the second color has already been done. Next more areas in the design will be covered with wax either completely in some areas, or partially covered with filler motives called issen-issen. The cloth will be colored a third time after this.
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In this photo the third and final color has been added after areas of the second color were covered with wax. Now the cloth is ready for “lorod”, removing the wax.
Batik making is by nature a collaborative process. Many different skills are required and usually only one person masters each skill. Women are most skilled in applying the wax.
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The cloth is a silk jacquard from Korea. Usually a plain weave is used, but this scarf is an experiment to see what will result from batiking a cloth that has a design woven into the fabric. Men skilled only in drafting usually draw the designs on the cloth . Yet another person who could be a man or a woman usually creates the designs. Men almost always do the coloring.
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Each step in the process depends on the one before it; if the design is poorly drawn on the cloth, the batiker cannot usually improve it with the canting, the tool used to apply the wax. If the wax is not properly applied, the color can leak through and cause an unwanted result when the wax is removed. If the coloring is not good, the end result will not be good, regardless of the beauty of the design and the skill of the batiker.
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The batiker demonstrates her skill in applying issen-issen, filler motives. Often the batiker has mastered a repertoire of hundreds of different designs.
I will be posting more photographs of works in progress and soon a gallery of finished pieces.
I arrived in Solo after 26 hours and three flights on the evening of my birthday August 12th, met by Hartono in full court regalia, including a parang rusak barong motif batik, a design originally worn only by the king. When he asked before I left the US how I wanted to get home from the airport which is about 25 km, I jokingly told him by oxcart. Instead he hired a dokar,
a traditional mode of transport in many rural areas of Java. It is a wonderful horse-drawn buggy and I had never ridden one before. It was a warm clear evening and I thoroughly enjoyed the two-hour ride home to Karanganyar. A wonderful meal of my favorite Javanese dishes prepared by Mbak Minah, my housekeeper, awaited me, and a birthday cake with a very special wish for my 60th year. “Welcome in 59, Year of You”.
Tonight I will depart for Central Java in Indonesia. I have a small workshop there with batik designer and producer, Hartono. We collaborate to create variations on traditional batik designs on silk and cotton, much of it hand-woven from Laos and Cambodia. I spend about six months each year there creating designs inspired by traditional textiles from all over SE Asia. Batik-making is a fascinating art and I will be posting photographs of the process here during the next two months.
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I started The Language of Cloth five years ago as a means to support my travel habit. I have always been interested in textiles and usually brought a few pieces back from every country I visited, beginning in Central America 40 years ago. I liked the fact that textiles are easily carried and pack a lot of culture. I had been working in the design field as a decorative painter for many years and sometimes clients wanted to buy some of my textiles. I decided to try collecting and selling textiles as a business and soon I realized that I had found my true calling. My travel is always focused on the indigenous weaving and textile production wherever I go and that path has lead to some of the richest experiences of my life. I’ve started this blog as a way of sharing them and I will be adding to the site as I am able.
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