Textiles of Indonesia, Thomas Murray

Cloths are not just worn, they are lived landscapes—each warp and weft a geography of ritual, trade, belief and beauty. This book unveils ceremonial and ritual textiles drawn from decades of collecting across Indonesia’s islands—from the rich reds and golds of Sumba and Timor, to the layered ikats of Batak and the lampung tapis, to the dramatic beaded and dyed cloths of the Dayak, Toraja, and Lampung regions. Photographs are immaculate: textures, sheen, dye-bleed, beadwork, pattern breaks, all rendered so you feel the fibres beneath your eyes. The geographic ordering of the material frames traditions in motion—how dye recipes travel, how motifs shift with climate and belief, and how the cloths themselves are embodiments of social meaning, not mere decorative artifacts.

The attention to detail, the care in presentation, the cultural weight given to otherwise “everyday” ritual cloths—this book does what Selvedge readers might expect: it invites slow, reverential looking, an appreciation of craftsmanship, a sense that cloth is archive and art, spirit and stitch.

About the Author
Thomas Murray is one of the world’s foremost dealers and collectors of Asian and tribal art, particularly celebrated for his holdings in textiles and antique Indonesian sculpture. He has been a contributing editor for HALI magazine for nearly thirty years, acting as consultant on ethnographic textiles, and has published widely. His collection—meticulously assembled over forty years—provides not just the objects, but the lens through which they are rendered in this volume.

Publication date: 2021
Publisher: Prestel Publishing
Pages: 526
ISBN: 9783791387659