Pinta and I headed back to Klaten again today. The one and a half hours motorcycle ride was no less taxing than the previous. Looks like it will take more time till my ass gets seasoned enough to ready myself for the countless of subsequent-trips.
We stopped for a short discussion over Es Buah (fruit salad in iced syrup). It was the most fantastic I ever had, with a variety of 9 different fruits at its freshest, all sliced into delightful cubes. Over this pseudo lunch, we talked about what the best arrangement with the ibu-ibu (senior ladies/mothers) of Kebon Indah might be. There was a total of 159 of them and though I will love very much to, I couldn’t imagine photographing all of them within the next 3 months.
After the Es Buah treat, the both of us just headed straight to worrk to visit Bapak Rembrandt. To our surprise, all the ladies of the workshop were at a farewell partyto send off the IOM team who have been helping them sustain the Batik business for the past 5 years. There was much fanfare (a buffet spread of good food as well) when we got there. But underlying it was an air of uncertainty. Could hand-waxed, naturally dyed batik compete with the mass manufacturers of synthetic, digitally printed Batik from China? Only time and the tastes of the Indonesian market could tell.
At the party we got in touch with Mdm Sumina, the wife of Bapak Rembrandt and headed back to their Batik workshop for some discussion. Mdm Sumina listened attentively to our proposal though she looked rather confused with the process. She told us that it is her shared mission with the other ladies to hand down the tradition of batik making to the later generations and that she and Bapak will be supportive of the project. Yet, both of them weren’t too sure whether the other ladies of the village will participate. They told me working samples of the images on fabric will help with talking to the other ladies. This request stepped up my determination to create the fabric prints. It is now or never that I had solve the issue of printing through and through.
Before we left, Bapak let us experiment with coloring the silk fabric we bought with the natural dyes. The outcome not like anything I’ve seen before (and I mean this positively). The mango dye gave a shimmery like copper finish and the yellow shone like gold. Apparently just within 2-3 immersions of the silk the color came through. This unlike cotton fabric (Primisima) which requires 30 times of immersing and drying the fabric. Whilst waiting for the saples to dry Bapak introduce us to some of the botanica at his backyard from which he would extract the dyes from. He said “The colors on the batik is from nature and what we find from nature comes from God. This beauty we see here is God-given.” I will admit that it is not part of my daily life that I will think about the world beyond a particular reality, yet I do believe that there is something spiritual about the process of working with nature to create beauty. I’m sure there are times when you had such and experience and I hope it will be something I will bring to people as an artist.
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