Kasongan Pottery Works

The area around Jogjakarta, including Kasongan Village, is considered an important area for pottery in Java. It’s called a center for the arts, and know for pottery as well as theater and fabric.

The two places we visited both had pottery brought in and added the finish for resale, mostly on a wholesale basis. The first shop focused on large vases. They painted the outsides with glue, then attached pieces of colored glass for a mosaic effect.

Several women did this work at the same time. They had bars of pre-scored glass that they snapped off with their fingers as they worked.

The glass came into the shop as regular sheet glass. The owner painted the glass, then used a diamond tipped pen to make the scoring.

The second shop only had one woman working when we came by. She had a large order of hallway ash trays/trash receptacles, which she’d brought in as plain pottery.

First she put on a base color – either white or black – on both the trash receptacle part and on the ashtray which was made to sit on top of the trash part and act as a lid. Then she inverted the trash section and carefully layered in a copper top coat.

This was a special order for a particular hotel chain. Most of the time she makes piggy banks shaped like good fortune turtles, and other items which she sells to stores. She did do individual orders, too. I spotted a Buddha in the very back of her shop. It was waiting for the man who commissioned it to come pick it up.