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In Batu Lumpang Let The Great Wheel Spin
Ceremonial: Ni Ketut Lemon has been making ceremonial clay pots on her hand driven wheel for more than 70 years
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Ceremonial: Ni Ketut Lemon has been making ceremonial clay pots on her hand driven wheel for more than 70 years.
With only the most rudimentary of tools, Ni Ketut Lemon has been making clay pots for the past 70 years.
In her bamboo and tin-walled studio in Batu Lumpang village, the potter kneads the clay she has dug from her garden. There is little sign of her age ' although after more than eight decades, her arms and hands are still strong and supple, her back is straight and her face almost unlined.
She has the frame of a dancer. The physical craft that has fed and clothed her family has also gifted her with health in her twilight.
Lemon's pots are, like her wheel, functional. They are not pretty pots, but they are extraordinary because Lemon spins her wooden wheel head with her left hand while pulling pots with her right. This is very like patting your tummy while rubbing your head, for hours on end.
In wheel-work pottery, the first rule is to center your ball of clay. This is achieved on kick wheels and electric wheels by centrifugal force as the wheel spins at high revolutions per minute.
Assistance from centrifugal force is not active on Lemon's wheel, yet she turns out pot after pot with the fine, even walls that are the hallmark of a skilled potter throwing beautifully centered clay; how Lemon does this on a wobbly wooden wheel turned by hand is confounding.
'I taught myself to make pots when I was about 15 years old. Mom and dad worked the rice fields so they didn't teach me this craft. My grandmother once was a potter, but she didn't teach me either,' says Lemon.
She holds up a tiny earthenware finger bowl. 'I taught myself by taking earth and making very small pots like these,' adds Lemon, who grew up in an area known for functional pottery.
'There were many of us potters in the past. Now they have all gone. The work is dirty and the young ones did not want to learn. I keep making pots for the temple ceremonies,' says Lemon, while pulling a tall pot on her wheel. 'This one is for cremations, those round ones there are for the Mas clinic. When babies are born the placenta is placed in those lidded pots and then buried.'
Her potter's wheel is essentially a round slab of timber fixed by a rotating bolt to a log that has a seat carved into its mass. Crumbling and pitted outer edges of the wheel head attest to its age and heavy use. This elementary tool has been in use for decades says Lemon.
'Yes, it's a bit broken,' says Lemon. 'This was made by a local builder 50 years ago. He had never made a wheel before, but this was the design used in our area. We never had kick wheels or machine wheels, always these hand-turned wheels. So yes making pots like this is more difficult,' says Lemon.
Kick wheels allow potters to use two hands and can reach much higher revolutions, electric wheels are far more advanced again. But these basic wooden wheels that take little space do the job and are a technology that was once available to every woman who, if she had access to clay, could make her own kitchen, cooking, storage or water pots.
A few kilometers away in Parangsada village, also in Gianyar, Wayan Doble, is making pots larger than herself. The woman who does not know her age ' only the major events that marked her years ' said that she learned the craft from a friend.
She began her potting career back in the late 1950s, when Indonesia's first president was Sukarno.
Half a century on, Doble says that she makes 22 large pots on a good day, also on a wooden wheel head turned by hand.
The pots are built using the coil-and-wheel technique, where potters throw down a base and then grow the pots with large coils of clay smoothed by hand, pulled upwards and thinned with the wheel.
Doble's mastery over her clay can only achieved after a lifetime at the wheel.
Parangsada was once known for its pottery, says I Rinten, who at 50 is one of the few potters left in her village. 'I learned from my grandmother. Everyone here used to make pots ' the skills came down from our ancestors, but now there are just a few of us still making. Others have gone to work as laborers,' says Rinten, adding that pottery was always the work of women, their men folk helping out by collecting grass and fire wood for the firing of the pottery.
Ketut Lemon these days collects her own fire wood and grasses for her brick kiln, housed at the rear of her studio. 'After the pots have dried, that's where I fire them. It takes about three hours,' she says of the low-fired pottery that, along with the trade of the potters, is at risk of being lost to the world.
' Photos By JB Djwan
