Bark. Silk. Batik: On the Art of Batik with Nature. Lecture with Textile Artist Joachim Blank.

What has a piece of wood, picked up on a mudflat hike, in common with Indonesian batik? How can an abstract pattern on organza be created from the half-rotted bark of an old tree? And how can one bring the lines of reeds arranged next to each other onto a piece of fabric?

The Berlin-based textile artist Joachim Blank provides answers to these questions. What Blank finds in nature, he turns into a tool for a technique with which he uses to artistically relate the structural properties of the objects he found to his fabrics - organza, cotton or silk, for example. The technique he uses is based on the centuries-old Javanese technique of batik, and this is where colour comes into play as a third element, which for Blank is a means of accentuation, delimitation and pictorial symmetry.

"The appearance of natural forms is brought into a new order through the creative-artistic process," Joachim Blank says of his work. "The materials that I combine with each other, their structures and natural drawings combine in the picture, which, however, is not subject to a fixed design principle. This develops during the creative process and controls itself through seemingly random assignments to each other."

On the occasion of the Indonesian National Day of Batik, which is celebrated on October 2, we invited Joachim Blank to be guest of the 123rd Sarasehan lecture. Using numerous picture examples he told us how he himself became fascinated by the batik technique during his studies and how he was taught by renowned grand masters of Javanese batik art in Indonesia like Ardiyanto, Amri or Ismoyo. He explained how he began working with unusual materials and how he came up with the idea of adding other techniques such as the use of layers and burnout. Blank told us how he was invited to workshops in Indonesia, China and Malaysia as an artist and what he experienced there. Finally, he spoke about how difficult it is to build a reputation as a recognized artist with modern art in the field of batik.

Joachim Blank was born in 1952. He has won several awards, studied arts and crafts at the University of Mainz. He has been working as an artist since 1981. His work has been shown in numerous international group and solo exhibitions in Germany, China, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Poland, the USA, Denmark, Belgium and Russia. As a guest teacher he gave lectures, master classes and workshops at universities in China, Indonesia and Austria.

This is the edited recording of a Zoom Meeting with Joachim Blank that took place on Thursday, 30 September 2021 online on Zoom.