Indonesia’s ancient traditions of labour-intensive
hand-tied ikat vary from island to island, but one common
thread runs through them. They all maintain — all be
it tenuously — natural dye traditions that employ a
wide range of plant materials for dyes and mordants in the
production of complex ritual and sacred textiles, some of
which take years to complete.
Ubud-based Threads of Life is a certified Fair Trade business
that helps traditional ikat-producing communities across Indonesia
maintain their heritage of natural dyes. With its sister organization,
the nonprofit Yayasan Pecinta Budaya Bebali, Threads of Life
is active in remote communities in Sulawesi, West Kalimantan,
Java, and Bali, and on the islands of Flores, East Sumba,
Savu, Lembata, Timor in East Nusa Tenggara.
East Nusa Tenggara is a cradle of expertise in complicated
tying, dying and weaving techniques. Its ikats are fiendishly
complex in strategy and construction, with many taking years
to complete. The weavings’ motifs are rich in cultural
lore, ceremony and tradition. Many are still used as bride-wealth
and in ceremonies for house raisings and funerals.
“The traditional textiles of Indonesia reflect a deep
engagement with nature and community that has sustained indigenous
people through the centuries,” says I Made Rai Artha,
co-founder of Threads of Life. “The beauty of these
textiles is self-evident, but their deepest gift is in the
stories they tell. The motifs are rich in cultural lore.”
Young women today aren’t generally interested in spending
years producing a single piece of cloth, leaving that labour-intensive
task to their mothers and grandmothers. But as the older women
die, the rich tradition of spinning, tying, dying and weaving
ritual textiles in this country could disappear within a generation.
There’s another reason the traditional weaving has been
laid aside. The ripple effect of Indonesia’s monetary
crisis that began in 1997 soon reached even the remote shores
of East Nusa Tenggara. The impact would have been slight a
generation ago in these communities where barter economics
was the norm. Barter is still common, but now people need
cash to send their children off-island for schooling and to
purchase essential commodities. Not only have the women begun
to sell their traditional ritual textiles for much-needed
cash, they are now too busy producing cheap weavings for both
the tourist and local markets to create the time-consuming
heritage textiles. The market demand now is for cheap, small
weavings using chemical dyes and pre-spun fibre.
With support from Threads of Life, traditional weavers can
continue to create heritage textiles using natural fibres
and dyes. Threads of Life provides advance payments for important
pieces that may take years to complete, finds Indonesian and
international markets for weavers’ work and helps remote
communities network, share and build on their knowledge of
natural dyes.
There are over 200 different dye plants in the palate of Eastern
Indonesian textile artists. Indigo and Morinda are the principle
dyes, producing blues and reds respectively. Other shades
and hues are found in sources such as mangrove bark, jackfruit
and mango wood, casuarina bark, and eucalyptus alba. Many
are rare, hard to grow or difficult to harvest. Morinda (also
known as Tiba or Noni) for example is used as a red dye, but
the part of the plant used is the bark of the root. It’s
very difficult to sustainably harvest at a commercial level
without stressing or killing the tree. The bark from the roots
of two trees is needed to dye one small cloth and it must
be used immediately.
“Tying, dying and weaving a textile over many years
brings a lot of life-force energy to the piece,” says
Rai Artha, who has been studying Indonesian dying and weaving
for years. “The finished textiles hold a lot of power.”
There’s a good market for these textiles among wealthy
Indonesians and foreign collectors, and Threads of Life facilitates
this through its website www.threadsoflife.com.
The intricate process of creating a traditional textile is
almost unbelievably labour-intensive. The fibres are selected,
spun, placed on a frame, then meticulously bundled and tied
off to create the desired pattern. The weaver does this by
imagining the three dimensions of the entire finished piece
as she ties each group of threads to resist the dye. When
using red tones, a mordant, which connects the dye to fibre,
must be used to prepare the threads. Mordants must include
three elements – a protein, a tannin and an aluminum
salt or other metal salt. Many Indonesian communities use
kimiri nut oil as the protein, which gives the final textile
a distinctive texture and aroma. Tannins are available in
many plants and each weaver will have their favourite. The
aluminum salt is extracted from plants of the Symplocos family,
which contain up to 50% of the material in their dry leaves.
Drying the threads after the mordant process can take at least
four months, but longer drying improves the colour significantly.
“Doubling the mordant time from one to two years makes
the colour much brighter,” Rai Artha explains. “That’s
why we pay part of the cost of the finished textile up front
— to enable the family to live during the long dying
process and so they won’t be tempted to rush this critical
step.” When the mordant and dying are complete, the
threads are unbundled and sorted so that the weaving process
can begin. A skilled weaver can complete about five centimeters
an hour, but due to the highly concentrated nature of the
work can’t weave for more than four hours a day. Depending
on the size of the textile and the complexity of the pattern,
the weaving alone may take over a month to complete.
Threads of Life has become an international centre of excellence
for traditional textiles from East Nusa Tenggara. The Threads
of Life Textile Arts Centre in Jalan Kajeng in Ubud not only
displays these rare textiles for sale, but serves as a museum
and education centre for the ancient art of Indonesian ikat
production. It also offers short classes on Indonesian textiles
and a seasonal full-day workshop on indigo dyeing at the Yayasan
Pecinta Budaya Bebali’s nearby headquarters that include
a dye garden that contains a growing number of traditional
dye and cotton plants with an adjacent dyeing laboratory.
An air-conditioned room in the office houses the herbarium
— a collection of about 100 of the dye plants used in
East Nusa Tenggara.
Certified as a Fair Trade organization by the International
Fair Trade Association (www.ifat.org), Threads of Life ensures
that the women whose hands create these traditional textiles
are generously compensated for their art, thus engaging young
women in the weaving art and keeping this precious aspect
of Indonesian heritage alive.
