Artistic touch: Brightly painted mahkota are a common sight on Balinese rooftops (JP/J.B Djwan)

Village pottery is an ancient Indonesian tradition. Small-scale potteries are still found across the archipelago, with remains of their forerunners often turning up as shards in the clay beds dug today.

One family from Tabanan in south Bali has been working with clay for as long as they can remember.

“We were the pioneer tile makers here hundreds of years ago,” says potter I Nyoman Wena, now a grandfather. “What we started back then has grown into a big industry for the district,” he says of Tabanan, which has many hectares of clay soils and where a good percentage of Bali’s roof tiles and roof decorations are made.

A stroll through the region’s streets turns up terracotta housing materials in a myriad of shapes

and forms, from the humble roof tile to the extravagantly carved mahkota or roof centerpieces,

some of which are painted in bright colors for that extra bit of rooftop glamour.

Tile making is a family concern in Wena’s home. A massive wood-fired kiln has pride of place, hillocks of wet mud are turned and churned into a workable body of clay, and still-wet roof tiles are stacked under plastic sheets to dry slowly before firing.

Wena’s family can turn out hundreds of tiles a day, as can many of their neighbors; thousands of tiles are made across this region and shipped across Bali.

But master potter Wena, his hands alive with skills long practiced, rarely turns his attention to simple tiles.

A potter all his life, by the mid-1960s Wena felt it was time to stretch his artistic wings and see where they carried him. He lays claim to designing Bali’s first roof mahkota, which now line the walls of local roof tile shops and adorn many Balinese homes and hotels.

“It would have been 50 years ago, in the 1960s, that I pioneered mahkota for our roofs,” he says.

“I had a picture – a vision – in my mind of the mahkota for decoration. We did have roof decorations, but they were very simple. I had the idea to carve them and change the design.”

Wena started playing with the idea of decorating roofs because “mahkota make houses more beautiful”.

Soon after Wena’s earliest mahkota were perched on Balinese rooftops, other potters began to borrow his designs.

“I was pleased about that because orders for them were so strong – I could not have made all the mahkota wanted,” says Wena, clearly unconcerned about intellectual property, but rather showing pleasure at sharing his ideas. Others were soon developing their own visions for roof decoration. “A local guy here came up with the frangipani flowers on the tiles to edge roofs,” Wena says. “That was not mine.”

Before long, Wena was adding to the roof decorations with corner pieces featuring dragons, garuda masks or whatever else captured his imagination.

Some of his flights of fancy resulted in the dwarf-like characters straight from a Grimm’s fairytale which sit happily watching the goings on of the world from their rooftop vantage point. “I make these by hand – I can only make three a day, but people like them a lot,” says Wena.

He might be getting long in the tooth, but wiry Wena still works daily in his pottery, although helping mold the clay of childhood is now his most cherished project. Passing on the family’s potter tradition is now a grandfather’s greatest joy, he says: His grandchildren, 11-year-old Putu and six-year-old Putri, are already learning the family business.

“I like learning to make things from clay and helping in the pottery,” says Putri.

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