Image credit: Johan Brooks, Japan Times

Thu-Huong Ha, writer for Japan Times, ran an article on Indonesian-Canadian artist Ari Bayuaji last week. Bayuaji was our third artist in residence at REDBASE Foundation Yogyakarta and presented his solo show, Weaving the Ocean, at REDBASE Sydney in November 2022.

Japan Times writes:

“One-Eyed Rangda” is a mixed-media, roughly human-sized sculpture with an impressive coif of what appears to be colored thread but is, in fact, plastic. In Balinese lore, Rangda is the queen of witches and a bringer of plagues. At the beginning of the pandemic, says Bayuaji, police in Bali wore Rangda masks to convey the danger of the COVID-19 virus.

Around the same time, he was walking the deserted beaches near his hotel in Bali, where he encountered two common sights: tangles of plastic choking mangrove forests and people out of work due to the pandemic. Bayuaji, a lover of found objects and the son of active community members, envisioned a new project.

In exchange for rice and money, he asked people to help him collect, clean and unravel the plastic ropes and nets from fishing boats that were getting caught in the root systems. Once the ropes have been cut, they can’t be reused, and Bayuaji could see that the thick blue and green cords, once unwound, contained bright colors inside. This is by design: The brighter hues signal quickly to boat crew that a rope has been damaged — but Bayuaji saw in the ropes’ function their potential as a material for art. He repurposed the found plastic to create large woven pieces using traditional weaving techniques and built two likenesses of the witch demon for what would become his ongoing series “Weaving the Ocean.”

“Rangda is almost like plastic,” he says. “They’ll both haunt us.”

Read more. In Weaving the Ocean, the artist transformed plastic waste that washed up on the coast of Bali and turned them into contemporary works of art. In doing so, Ari addresses pressing environmental and social issues such as pollution of the oceans and the destruction of marine life caused by the local tourism industry. Taking inspiration from the role sea plays in the blessing and purification rituals and combining it with the textile production, Ari pays homage to the Balinese spiritual life and Balinese cultural heritage.