Making Pottery in a Modest Way
By wisnu broto
11 Sep 2007
Located at Pagerjurang hamlet, Melikan village, Wedi Subdistrict, 15 kilometres away from Klaten, Central Java, Indonesia, the image of a bustling pottery center. About eighty percent families especially mothers in this hamlet involved in the ceramics making to earn a living.
Ceramics have became the heart of the hamlet since more or less 300 years ago. Unlike the ordinary ceramics making using flat potter's wheel, the Pagerjurang craftswoman use a unique device with special technique. They use a slanted potter's wheel called perbot in local languages with sideway twisting technique. It rotates three times faster than ordinary pottery wheels because of the earth gravity. The downside is the unique wheel cannot be used to create large objects. The product has maximum height of 30 centimeters.
According to local belief, the technique arrived in Pagerjurang because the influence of Moslem cleric Sunan Bayat who spread Islamic teachings in the area in the 17th century. He, Sunan Bayat requested local villagers to develop a device which enabled craftswomen to sit in a modest way while creating ceramics, without having to sit with their legs spread apart. Since then, the technique is just like an inheritance which has been passed on from generation to generation.
Nowadays, ceramics is still produced by Pagerjurang's villagers. The move towards modern, they use not only sideway twisting technique but also develop the common one to shape bigger ceramics. Water jugs and other traditional household appliances is still produced to serve local markets; and the result of ceramics development so-called terracotta ceramics is produced as decorative objects like teapots, bowls, plates, vases and other interior decorations.
