art_and_craft.htm

Lombok is not only popular with its beautiful earthenware pottery, hand weaving, ketak grass weaving, primitives wood carving, rattan furniture or natural sea pearls, other than that, Lombok Limestone is a unique handmade crafts using special technique and skills to complete Lombok's Art and Handicraft's catalogues.

Lombok Limestone is now on high demands because of its unique and natural colors. It can match any space in your garden, galleries, hotel's lobbies or any place which require a touch of nature and primitives atmosphere. Not widely known yet by International market, but has becoming very popular nowadays. Many local boutique hotels and villas design their lobby wall or give some touch of arts with this product.

In old days, the making of sands stone art were basically for grave's head stone. The locals artist from the village of origin just receives orders to create a flat square sands stone for richer families to decorate their ancestor's grave. Then came the ideas of developing the materials into various daily households needs such as; Garden Lamp holder, Statues, Water Fountain, Ashtray, Garden Pots, etc. The results were amazing. The distribution is not as wide as other kind of Lombok crafts, because the basic materials available only in one isolated village, up in the hill somewhere about 12kms from Pujut (South Lombok). They using very simple tools to dig in to certain depth of ground and carried out the raw materials before the making of basic shapes. The process could take 1-2 days if the weather are friendly.

Unlike Lombok pottery, which most of the work done by women during their spare time, the sands stone carving mostly involve men in the area of production. The needs of high concentration, cigarettes and coffees helps them with inspirations and ideas. This people are not well educated on management system or hi-tech knowledge, but creative and innovative. Farming is their main activity in life. Serious attention on developing their knowledge on management system and handling will take them into a better way of living. Lombok Network Tour Division is in progress of includes this village in one of our special tour programs to help promoting their beautiful art-work. God willing!.

Earthenware ceramics represent one of the most ancient craft traditions of Indonesia. Traditionally, pottery in Lombok was used in the village household to store rice, water salt and spices.

Penujak, Banyumulek and Masbagik are the three main villages in Lombok where the pottery comes from. These villages had their own distinct styles and methods which were further developed and improved under the aid plan to an extent that now their pottery products are exported around the world.

In Penujak village for example, women makes the shape of the pots and men decorating them when they were half dry and proceed on baking and finalize them with additional methode. The decoration it self is quite specific to the pots origin in Penujak their specialty is to the design all their earthenware with gecko motifs their special mark. Banyumulek village uses rattan and old coins to decorate their products and Masbagik, being near the sea, uses the star fish motif.

Making the pots is not simple at all; in fact it is a length and complicated process to make one simple pot and this complexity increases with specific orders from buyers. The clay comes from hills nearby these three main villages, where it is brought to the potter's home by horse-drawn cart. The clay can't be used immediately and has to be inspected to ensure there aren't any stones or other impurities in it.

It is then cut into small cubes and dried in the sun. The first step takes three to four days. when the clay cubes are dried, they are pounded into a clay flour, and stored before being used as a dough. What is fascinating to see is that there is no potter's wheel. Instead, layers are continually added to the original piece of dough while the maker herself moves around the object pressing it into the desired shape. although the final shape is apparent the post is not nearly ready. It is now given to someone else for decorating.

The pots are then left in the shade to dry while waiting for the next step in the process which is the varnishing. The pots are varnished with a mixture of coconuts oil and another special type of clay which comes from a different village. Different colours are produced from different clays. The pots are again left to dry before they are scraped with a black stone so that the surface becomes shiny and ready for the next drying process. This takes places in the hot sun and takes almost a full day; it even involves a brushing in the steaming hot midday sun which further improves the luster.

This article and picture was taken from Lombok Network.