Tag Archives: Bali

Tenganan: Home of Bali’s rarest textiles 14/11/2014

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Very few women still practise this art

A double ikat weaver at her loom

TEXT AND PICTURES BY GEOFF VIVIAN

Tenganan in southeast Bali is one of the villages that preserves a pre-Hindu “Bali Aga” culture that may be thousands of years old.

Indonesia's rarest textiles

These are Indonesia’s rarest textiles, produced in just one Bali village.

A feature of this is the double-ikat weaving, requiring warp and weft threads to be meticulously tie died before the weaver puts them together.

Tenganan is the only place in Indonesia that still produces double ikat, and in this story I explain how you can get to Tenganan and visit a double ikat weaver.

inBali [read this story]

Judgement and the vulnerable male July 2013

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TEXT BY GEOFF VIVIAN

This appeared as a catalogue essay for Paul Trinidad’s latest Bali exhibition. It also appears on his website here.

JUDGEMENT AND THE VULNERABLE MALE

 

“… though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow….”
– Isaiah 1:18
Judgement and the vulnerable male are recurring themes in Paul Trinidad’s life and work.

He grew up in the Western Australian Goldfields towns of Kalgoorlie and Leonora. These communities began as temporary settlements for men who dug and scraped for gold. As deep mines replaced mine shafts dug by hand, male mine workers still vastly outnumbered women. The preponderance of single men in the Goldfields saw the state’s first Premier, John Forrest, reluctantly give women the vote rather than have his conservative government overturned by working men.

In his youth Trinidad spent several years in the wilderness, but not in harmony with nature. With his father and brother he worked a three-man gold mine at Lake Darlot. Together they pitted their minds and muscles against the hostile desert. They were pursuing a universal measure of men’s worth, extracted by toil and fire – gold. Continue reading →