FRIDAY, March 29, 2024
nationthailand

Where the pots have a special slant

Where the pots have a special slant

No ceramics in the world can compare to what comes out of the tiny Indonesian hamlet of Pagerjurang

A village in Klaten in Central Java, Indonesia, has developed a reputation for using an unorthodox way to produce pottery, the slanted rotation technique.
Pagerjurang, a hamlet of Melikan village in Bayat district, is known as a pottery centre, where 210 of the 235 resident families crafting products for sale.
In the slanted rotation technique, the wheel turns on an oblique rather than remaining horizontal, as is usually the case in fashioning ceramics.
The distinctiveness of this method is confirmed by Sukanta, a craftsman who also serves as village secretary. He’s toured various pottery-producing regions of Indonesia and visited China, and is convinced that the slanted-wheel technique originated in Bayat and has been practiced there for centuries.
“If people in other regions use the same method, they certainly come from here, or else they’ve been taught by someone from here,” Sukanta says.
In 1992 a professor from Japan, Chitaru Kawasaki, visited Melikan. Head of the Department of Ceramics at Kyoto Seika University in Kyoto, Kawasaki wanted to see the technique for himself. He even took two of the craftspeople to Japan to demonstrate the method at a ceramics exhibition.
The system is capable of turning out pots more quickly than usual, as well. A relish container seven to 10 centimetres in diameter takes less than a minute to make, a 20cm rice dish around 90 seconds, and a 15-by-25cm pot for gudeg, the jackfruit-and-coconut-milk stew, about two and a half minutes. “My wife can make more than 140 teapots a day,” says Sukanta. 
The other unique feature of Pagerjurang pottery-making is the predominance of female workers. Sukanta says they’re all women in his village, while the men are only engaged in finishing techniques.
“Crafting pottery in the sloping position requires some finesse, a quality that most women have,” he surmises. 
Siswanti, a middle-aged woman who’s been making pottery for the last 10 years, produces 100 gudeg pots daily and up to 1,000 a month. Her husband helps her with finishing touches, like dyeing and polishing. The total time needed to process clay into pottery ready for sale is around three to five days, depending on the weather. “At first I only worked part-time, which turned out to be fairly profitable because everything sold out,” says Siswanti.
Another characteristic of Melika’s Bayat pottery is the deep-brown colour after firing, which cannot be imitated anywhere else. This hue results purely from the firing process rather than the glazing. “The clay in this area gives rise to this effect, for unknown reasons,” says Sukanta.
Several years ago, he says, a potter from another region working with a big ceramics business in the district returned home after several months with his pickup truck full of clay to be processed by the same technique learned from Pagerjurang. But the end result was a different colour.
“We have no idea why it turned out that way,” says Sukanta. “It may be that all elements in the process affect each other, involving the clay and sand used as well as the phases of production.”
For all of these reasons, Pagerjurang pottery continues to be buyers’ first choice. Local craftspeople routinely send their products to Yogyakarta, Solo, Semarang, Bandung, Malang, Jakarta and Surabaya. For foreign destinations they cooperate with major handicraft entrepreneurs who make regular deliveries to Australia and the Netherlands.
Pottery producers in Pagerjurang also frequently cooperate with craftsmen and businesspeople in Kasongan, a pottery centre in Yogyakarta, which enables them to expand their deliveries to countries like Argentina, France and Belgium.
“They’ve got to know us through Kasongan by word of mouth,” says 43-year-old Endang, a pottery vendor in Melikan. “We’re actually not yet as famous as Kasongan. For our broader foreign marketing, we have to do it via Kasongan.”
Melikan has become a tourist village neverthelesss, with signposts along the Yogyakarta-Solo Highway showing the way to the pottery-producing area, where visitors can survey the home industry and even practise the slanted-wheel technique.
 
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