Ikatten — the Indonesian resist-dyeing technique, derived from the Malay verb mengikat (to bind, from the root ikat), and translated into Dutch by Prof. Nieuwenhuis as figuurknoopen (“figure-knots”) — is the weaving-adjacent technique that Prof. T. J. Bezemer’s 1933 plate-atlas *Indonesische Kunstnijverheid* describes in the Inleiding § B (on weaving, pp. 5–7) as one of the principal procédé’s of Indonesian textile decoration. The technique is documented for the Atjeh silk-ikat tradition by the plates 65 and 66 of the Bezemer atlas, and is the technique underlying the Atjeh silk ikat weaving tradition more broadly.
The technique
The ikatten technique, as described by Bezemer (pp. 6–7), is a resist-dyeing process applied not to the finished cloth but to the warp-or-weft threads before weaving: “Het is een procédé van verven door middel van uitsparing, niet van afgewerkte weefsels, maar van de voor het weven bestemde draden” — “It is a process of dyeing by means of reservation, not of finished cloths but of the threads intended for weaving.” The weaver takes bundles of warp-threads (or, less commonly, weft-threads), wraps them locally with fibre-strips (vezelstrooken) so that the wrapped places resist the dye, and dips the bundles in the dye-bath. The wrapped places remain undyed; the unwrapped places take the dye; and when the wraps are removed, the warp-threads bear a resist-dyed pattern.
Bezemer gives a simple example to illustrate the process: “Men kan daartoe de garens op een raam spannen en de strengen omwinden, zoo dat b.v. een vogelfiguur van omwonden draden ontstaat. Gaat nu dat raam in een roode verfstof, en maakt men, na droging, de omwindingen los, dan heeft men een schering van roode draden met een witten vogel uitgespaard. Weeft men hier nu een éénkleurigen, laat ons zeggen, rooden draad doorheen, dan zal de vogelfiguur scherp op het ontstane weefsel uitkomen” — “One can, to that end, stretch the yarns on a frame and wrap the skeins so that, for example, a bird-figure of wrapped threads arises. If the frame now goes into a red dye-bath, and after drying one loosens the wrappings, one has a warp of red threads with a white bird reserved. If one weaves a single-coloured, let us say red, thread through it, the bird-figure will appear sharply on the resulting cloth.”
The technique thus produces a figured cloth by combining a resist-dyed warp with a plain weft: the figure is on the warp, the ground is the weft, and the figure appears sharply on the cloth because the resist-dyed warp-threads run the full length of the cloth. The technique is, in this sense, a warp-figure technique — the figure is built into the warp before weaving, and the weft serves only to bind the warp-threads together into a cloth.
Variants: warp-ikat, weft-ikat, double-ikat
Bezemer notes that ikatten is applied, in the Indonesian archipelago, principally to the warp: “Bijna overal worden alleen de ketting- of scheringdraden geikat” — “Almost everywhere only the warp- or schering-threads are ikatted.” The weft-ikat variant — in which the resist-dyeing is applied to the weft-threads rather than to the warp — is rare; Bezemer cites only the example of the désa Tenganan on Bali, “een dorpje dat zeer afgezonderd ligt in het gebergte op enkele uren afstand van Karangasém” — “a village that lies very isolated in the mountains, some hours’ distance from Karangasem.” The double-ikat variant — in which both warp and weft are ikatted — is even rarer; the Tenganan example is, in Bezemer’s account, the principal Indonesian case.
The Atjeh silk ikats documented in the Bezemer atlas — plate 65 and plate 66 — are both warp-ikats: the captions specify that the ikat is op de ketting (on the warp) / sur la chaine / auf der Kette, and the technique is therefore the standard warp-ikat variant of the ikatten process. The Atjeh silk ikats are, in this sense, examples of the more common of the Indonesian ikat variants, applied specifically to silk.
The aesthetic of the ikat cloth
Bezemer notes that the aesthetic appeal of the ikatten cloth lies, in part, in the soft blending of the colours at the edges of the resist-dyed pattern: “Een bijzondere bekoring van de geikatte weefsels is het in elkaar vloeien der kleuren, veroorzaakt door de omstandigheid dat de omwindingen allicht aan den rand niet volkomen tegen de inwerking der verfstof beschermd hebben” — “A special charm of the ikatted cloths is the flowing-into-each-other of the colours, caused by the circumstance that the wrappings have likely not perfectly protected the edges against the action of the dye-stuff.” The dyestuff, in other words, seeps slightly under the edges of the wraps during the dye-bath, producing a soft halo of colour around the resist-dyed figure. The soft edges are an inherent feature of the ikatten technique, and are — for Bezemer — a bekoring (charm) rather than a defect.
The same aesthetic applies to the Atjeh silk ikats of plates 65 and 66: the resist-dyed figures on the warp would, when woven, show the same soft halo of colour at the edges. The soft edges are part of what distinguishes the ikatten cloth from a printed or painted cloth, in which the edges would be sharper; they are the visible signature of the resist-dyeing technique.
Regional distribution
Bezemer names the principal Indonesian regions where ikatten is practised: the Timor-Archipelago for its splendid ikat-weavings; Bali for ikat-weavings and for fine silk weavings; Sumatra for silk weavings both ikatted and with gold-and-silver-thread inwoven. The Atjeh silk ikats of plates 65 and 66 are, in this sense, the Atjeh regional variant of the broader Sumatran silk-ikat tradition — a tradition that, in Bezemer’s classification, places Atjeh alongside the other Sumatran silk-weaving centres as a regional producer of ikatted silk cloth.
The use of imported silk yarn — documented in the caption of plate 65 — distinguishes the Atjeh silk ikats from the cotton ikats more typical of the archipelago, and links them to the broader Atjeh silk-culture tradition documented in the Atjeh silk culture entry. The Atjeh weavers applied the ikatten technique to imported silk yarn, ikatted on the warp, to produce silk cloths of a distinctive Atjeh regional type.
Significance
For Atjeh’s history, ikatten is significant principally as the technique underlying the Atjeh silk-ikat tradition documented in the Bezemer atlas’s plates 65 and 66. The technique is the standard Indonesian resist-dyeing process, applied to the warp before weaving; the Atjeh weavers applied it specifically to imported silk yarn, ikatted over the whole warp (plate 65) or in banded warp-strokes (plate 66), to produce the silk ikats that are the principal Dutch photographic documentation of the Atjeh silk-weaving tradition in the late colonial period. The term ikatten belongs to the same technical vocabulary as rimbaga, spinsbek / soeasa, cire perdue, granuleeren, and filigraanwerk — a vocabulary that, taken together, constitutes the late-colonial Dutch technical lexicon for Indonesian craft, within which Atjeh craft is described as a regional variant.
See Also
- Atjeh imported silk warp ikat (Bezemer plate 65)
- Atjeh silk ikat warp strokes (Bezemer plate 66)
- Atjeh silk ikat weaving
- Atjeh silk culture
- Atjeh silk yarn import from Singapore and Penang
- Atjeh weefgetouw (Bezemer plate 62)
- Indonesische Kunstnijverheid (Bezemer 1933)
- T. J. Bezemer
- Sumatra
- Bali
- Timor
- Acheh
Source
Indonesische Kunstnijverheid. Platen-Atlas met Inleiding van Prof. T. J. Bezemer (‘s-Gravenhage: N.V. tot Exploitatie van het Maandblad “Nederl-Indië, Oud en Nieuw”; ten Hagen’s Drukkerij en Uitgeversmaatschappij N.V., 15 October 1933), pp. 5–7 (describing the ikatten technique in the Inleiding § B on weaving) and plates 65, 66 (documenting the Atjeh silk-ikat tradition). Universiteitsbibliotheek Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, LS 5411.