Craft Gallery

This section features the main elements of Indonesian crafts not covered in the previous categories. This is by no means exhaustive, and will be updated on a regular basis.

Masks and Puppets
Masks and puppets date back to the first ritual dances in pre-historic Indonesian culture, and are still widely used today for fertility rites, planting ceremonies, ancestor worship and other auspicious occasions. Masked dance performances abound in Bali where the forces of good and evil play out their eternal battles; the most famous character of these is the fearsome dragon-lion beast, the Barong. Balinese and Javanese masks are usually elaborately decorated, whereas the more primitive ethnic designs of East Nusa Tenggera are typically chunky, dark woodcarvings with shell and bone inlays.

The best known puppets are those from Java. Epic tales from the Ramayana and Mahabarata are played out either with wayang golek (wood and cloth dolls) on a miniature stage, or with wayang kulit (flat leather puppets) in the famous shadow plays. The puppet master - dalang - skillfully maneuvers the puppets behind a brightly-lit screen, and the audience only sees the shadows. Wayang golek and wayang kulit puppets are elaborately decorated to depict the specific characters of the epic tales, but it is the talent of the dalang that brings them to life and gives voice to the puppets.

Pottery
Prehistoric earthenware pots dating back to more than 3,000 BC have been found in Sumba and South Sulawesi. What is striking about these discoveries is not the age, however, but the fact that the process of making pottery has hardly changed in 5,000 years. Local clay is shaped by hand, then fired in open bonfires, usually made from waste farm produce. As a result, pottery has developed hand in hand with farming, and pottery villages can be found in every province. Tools are very basic, yet decorations can be enormously elaborate. Pottery making as an artform reached its apogee in the 14th century Majapahit Empire, where intricately decorated ceremonial objets adorned the palaces in addition to the usual array of household utensils.

Woodcraft
The rainforests prevalent throughout Indonesia have supplied abundant wood for tool making and decorative work. The most ancient forms of woodcraft were weapons and ancestral wooden posts - totems dedicated to honouring the spirits of ancestors. These are still found in the tribal societies of Irian Jaya, Sulawesi and Kalimantan today. Highly decorative wooden picture frames, boxes, containers and a myriad of other household objects are also present in the rural households of Indonesia, but it is the Balinese who have raised woodcraft to a level of internationally acclaimed artistry. In Bali, there is often no real distinction between art and everyday life, the two being inextricably intertwined. Woodcarving families have long traditions creating objects of exquisitely intricate beauty dedicated to their Hindu gods, and this tradition has flourished into a major industry today. Children learn the feel of wood and chisel from an early age, and it was the extraordinary talents of woodcarvers that led to Michael Covarrubias' claim that "every Balinese is an artist".