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Vessels of Life | |||
Vessels of Life Bali Sacred & Secret Butterflies of Bali Against All Odds Abdul Aziz |
Lombok Earthenware by Jean McKinnon Vessels of Life is an important source of information on an underestimated people and a craft that is finally coming into its own after decades of being overshadowed by textiles. It is a piece of writing as ethnographically competent as it is lively, fascinating and filled with human interest. The photographs are excellent, often providing photo-ethnographic documents to complement the text. The author – an artist, scholar and advisor in the area of furtherance of the crafts – takes a holistic approach to her subject, handling it with affection, commitment and professional expertise. The result is a book about Sasak pottery in Lombok that is at the same time a book about the life and culture of a people, about rice and religion, cultural change and decline. The Sasak’s “Vessels of Life” possess a beauty born of simplicity and aesthetic form. It is high time we recognized the “low art” of utilitarian culture for the “high art” it really is. Only then can a sense of traditional values and forms survive in a world at the mercy of a belief in progress driven by economic, profit-oriented and technological considerations – a world about to abandon traditional knowledge and inherited skills as “outdated” and untimely”. In a world that tends to take people seriously mainly as producers and consumers, an age that exploits transport routes, natural resources, non renewable energy and utilisable forests with mounting shamelessness, the time has come to talk about rivers, soil and woods again. Jean McKinnon shows us how water and soil combine to make the clay that subsequently becomes the vessel which will ultimately hold water and rice, thus becoming a symbol of life it self. Vessels of Life appeals to a wide audience of readers interested in well-made, informative books in art and travel. It is also an indispensable source book for specialized art lovers, collectors and all who know and love Indonesia. About the Author: Jean McKinnon is an accomplished artist in her own right, a student of traditional Southeast Asian art forms and a consultant in craft development. Her interest in indigenous art started when as a student of Fine Arts at the University of California, Davis she studied the art and craft forms of many countries. She made New Zealand her base and it was from there that she commenced he travels through the Pacific Islands and Southeast Asia. Jean has worked in Solomon Islands villages, lived in rural North Auckland, raised children in Fiji, pursued her interest in craft over a long period resident in Thailand and exhibited her paintings and ceramic sculptural work in venues stretching from Wellington to Chiang Mai. Between 1988 and 1991 she managed the setting up and first three and half years of the Indonesia-New Zealand Lombok Craft Project, working to strengthen traditional techniques and develop new market outlets for Sasak pottery. Since then she has curated an exhibition of Sasak pots at the Dowse Art Museum in Hutt City, New Zealand, and carried out full time research into the historical meaning, contemporary use and development potential of the indigenous crafts of the Sasak.
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