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span class="caption" style="width: 467px;">Specialist: Silversmith Nyoman Miasa loves the craft he has worked at for almost six decades.Sitting shirtless in the midday heat at his rickety wooden workbench, 64-year-old Nyoman Miasa prepares silver rings for soldering. His 57-year-old wife Ketut Suarmi pumps the bellows-driven soldering iron flaring blue flame onto the rings.

Miasa has been making silver jewelry at his Celuk home for the past 57 years. Growing myopic in his old age, he depends on thick glasses to continue the work he started learning at his father’s knee as a 7-year-old.

“Back then I would go to school, come home and start learning from Dad,” says Miasa, barely looking up from the task at hand. This man’s lifelong journey with silver earns him and his wife less than US$5 a day. The couple says they can produce just a couple of rings daily that are sold for around $8. With the doubling of the price of silver and a massive downturn in sales since 2010, both their profit margin for each item and demand have shrunk to the point where their lifelong craft is becoming unviable.

This elderly couple, like many of Celuk’s once famed silversmiths, is also competing with machine-made copies of Balinese-style silver jewelry being imported from Thailand and China. Local silversmiths and their cooperative body, the Celuk Silver Cooperative, allege some of these products are then stamped “handmade in Bali”, Miasa can make a few rings per day, machines can turn out thousands.

This trifecta of troubles — silver price, global financial crisis and machine-made imports — has forced more than 25 percent of Celuk’s silversmiths to forsake their artistic heritage to seek jobs at construction sites and as “car wash attendants”, says the manager of the 126-member strong Celuk Silver Cooperative, Made Ardita.

Carrying on: Earning up to US$5 on a good day, handmade silver jewelry artisan Nyoman Miasa and his wife Ketut Suarmi now struggle to survive.
“We have many members who have given up — at least 25 percent don’t work in this field of handmade silver anymore. They have changed jobs to become laborers, set up different businesses or gone overseas,”

The Celuk Silver Cooperative supplies the raw materials to Celuk’s silversmiths, a glance at the co-op’s accounts shows starkly the dramatic slide in demand for these materials, in particular the silver at the heart of their profession. Before and during 2010 the co-op was selling up to 100 kilograms of silver monthly.

In 2011 the co-op sold 902 kilograms, this year that is down by almost 200 kilograms to just 731 kilograms of silver sold into its local market for handmade jewelry production. Account books show reductions in the number of buyers and the volume, where once they purchased 10 kilograms a month, silversmiths are now halving or quartering that to just a couple of kilograms to keep their businesses ticking. This reduction spells a 60 percent drop in sales to the co-op members, says Ardita, reflecting the 60 percent or greater fall in predominantly local handmade jewelry sales.

“The people going out of business here are the handmade home industries — perhaps because there are no orders, which may be due to the financial crisis in Europe and because the price of silver is fluctuating so much — one week it’s up and the next it is down, it’s not stable so there is a fear to buy silver in large amounts. We see our members are making to order only, not making stock,” says Ardita. He adds silversmiths are being forced to go toe to toe with machine-made jewelry imports, some of which he alleges are fakes. “We have imported machine-made products coming here to Bali from Thailand and China, then marked handmade in Bali. This is a product made from low quality silver. We have seen bronze plated with silver stamped 925 pure silver, not here in Celuk, but certainly in Bali,” says Ardita.

These fraudulent pieces could be the death knell for Bali’s silversmiths, says co-op staffer Dwi Asmarini. “If people sell fakes, people won’t buy Balinese silver again, so there are three factors that destroy the handmade silver business in Bali: imports, fake stamping and an unstable silver market,” says Asmarini.

Good hands: Silversmith Wayan Pariani makes the granulated silver jewelry Celuk is famous for just as her grandmother did in the past. Pariani earns US$4 a day. Like other silversmiths, her art is severely undervalued.
Within the community of Celuk there are deep concerns that if there is not a turnaround in demand for handmade silver very soon century-old skills could be lost forever.

But Celuk’s silversmiths are not throwing in the soldering iron just yet. Today they stand united, opening last week the Celuk Silver Art Market, a collection of local silversmith stalls that adhere to the organization’s rules on quality of silver and its production.

Head of the silver art market, 51-year-old Wayan Suwetha, says the market hopes to slow the demise of handmade silver in Celuk, and hopefully reposition the art form in the marketplace.

“This area was filled with tourists in the 1980s. Orders were flooding in for handmade Balinese silver, even government workers gave up their jobs to become silversmiths. Then there were the Bali bombs and we saw a slowdown, but since 2010 with the European crisis orders are well down. In the past we had orders from all over the world, but we are now up against machine-made imports from China and Thailand that can be produced much more cheaply. Orders used to be in the hundreds of units, now people are ordering just ten items, which is not enough to cover the costs of production,” says Suwetha, who hopes the Celuk Silver Art Market will become a center for excellence in handmade silver jewelry, as this silver-smithing community has been since 1915.

If the art market built on the skills of its 54 members fails to revitalize and restore silver-making to its rightful place in the arts, earning for craftsmen and women a living wage, Suwetha fears Celuk’s century of silver will be lost to history.

“We have already lost a lot of talented silversmiths — it is really a pity. Now we have just 10 percent of the really talented artists still here. Recently more than 50 percent have gone from making silver to cleaning cars or working as laborers. It’s like a boomerang, to be a silversmith you need to really know our traditions, the problem is silver-smithing here does not pay enough to live on, but as a day laborer you can earn enough for rice,” says Suwetha, heading up a group of artisans standing united to hold on to their craft in the face of a 21st century industrial revolution across Asia, foreign economies and fakes.

Meanwhile, 64-year-old silver artisan Miasa sits at his rickety workbench making silver rings one at a time, his grandchildren learning this art under threat, perhaps to no
future purpose.

— Photos by J.B. Djwan