Suyono: A portrait of the artist.

At his gallery, Suyono, creates artwork from batik patchwork from what some would say is trash.

The 44-year-old says he typically finds the material thrown away or on the floor of a tailor'€™s in his neighborhood.

'€œFor tailors, batik patchwork is a garbage. But for me, it is still a high-value product,'€ he said at his shop, Say Gallery, in Depok, which is home to more than 60 small and medium enterprises.

Suyono then took a pot with a diameter of 20 centimeters and decorated its sides with different batik patchwork using glue.

He lubricated the pot with putty (dempul) to seal cracks and to make it airtight before he put it under the sun for two hours.

Afterward, he varnished the dried pot to make it glossy. He repeated the varnishing process twice to three times.

The resulting batik motif on the pot looked natural '€” even like a painting.

The time needed to make one batik pot was at least four hours, he said.

Suyono has been producing around 50 batik pots at his gallery every week since 2010, a year after batik was named as part of the world'€™s cultural heritage by UNESCO.

At work: Suyono is making a batik pot.

The recycling idea, he said, came to mind after he found patchwork with beautiful motifs and colors wasted by tailors and housewives, including his wife.

He said that he understood if the tailors wasted the batik patchwork because they did not need it. However, he thought hard about a way to make the castoffs useful.

When he saw a pot at his house, the idea of combining it with batik patchwork popped up. His motivation was not only to beautify the pot, but also to make people more familiar with batik, whose motif saved a story and message, he said.

A batik kawung motif from Surakarta, Central Java, for example, symbolizes knowledge and noble characters, he said.

On the cloth, the kawung motif resembles a kolang-kaling (fruit of the sugar palm) or lotus with opened leaves that are painted in asymmetrical or geometric patterns.

He said that according to a Javanese fairytale, the kawung motif was created by a woman to express her happiness after her son, who was well known due to his intelligence and good attitude, was invited to meet a Mataram king in Java.

Natural look: The batik pots made by Suyono look natural or look like a painting after they have been varnished.

The woman, he said, painted the kawung motif on a cloth, giving it to her son before he left her. The message in the motif was to make him remember his past and to remind him to behave after he met the king.

The son fulfilled his mother'€™s hopes and also make the king impressed. He was then made a duke due to his impressive attitude.

At the tailor shops, Suyono found other popular batik motifs, such as grompol, parang, sekarjagad, ceplok sisik, sidomukti and sidomulyo.

'€œIn the Javanese language, sido means become, while mulyo means precious. Therefore, the message of batik sidomulyo is to control our anger and desire to make us become a precious human being,'€ he said.

He said that through the batik pots, he wanted to make people love batik more and to encourage them to learn its stories and to apply its messages.

Suyono said that when he began his business in 2010, his initial capital was only Rp 2 million (US$ 153), which was used to buy equipment, while the batik patchwork could be easily found in tailor shops.

He could get five to six kilograms of batik patchwork from tailors every month, he said.

He also asks housewives in his neighborhood to help him make batik pots if he received many orders, he said.

He said that he set different prices for his batik pots. The price of a pot with diameter of 45 cm, for example, was Rp 300,000.

Some of his customers, he said, had brought his pots to overseas as souvenirs. Some others bought it to beautify the exterior or interior of their homes and offices.

The challenge of making batik pot, he said, was how to combine various colors and patterns of patchwork into harmony.

'€œWe need a creativity to combine different patchwork in a pot,'€ said Suyono, who confessed that he learnt such skill alone from trial and error.

Say Gallery: Suyono makes his wares at a gallery in Depok, West Java.

'€” Photos by A. Kurniawan Ulung