Cinta Bumi Artisans x Powder Room: Afternoon Tea #004

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The 4th art afternoon tea was a color explosion!

Powder Room by R4D hosted Novieta Tourisia from Cinta Bumi Artisans and her natural ink workshop. The guests co-created with nature and explored mark making with inks made from Indonesian plants before enjoying the afternoon tea perfected by Powder Room.

Cinta Bumi Artisans is a studio led by Novieta Tourisia that works with ecoprints and botanical colors on paper and cloth. Each dye comes from nature and is fully traceable. Cinta Bumi Artisans believes everything that has made us the way we are now was established by our ancestors. And we have the ability to choose their wisdom to guide us in the way we live today.

Live drawing with Urban Sketchers in Bali

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Urban Sketchers is a global community of sketchers dedicated to the practice of on-location drawing. We’ve had the pleasure of collaborating with Urban Sketchers Bali for Ubud Open Studios and also hosting a meet-up at Powder Room by Room4Dessert. The range of styles and perspectives of the members is an amazing thing to watch as they live sketch.

“for all sketchers out there who love to draw the cities where they live and visit, from the window of their homes, from a cafe, at a park, standing by a street corner… always on location, not from photos or memory.”

The Sketches from Powder Room

The sketches from Ubud Open Studios 2023

Download Elami’s Design Guide to Ubud

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If you’re looking to experience Ubud through design eyes, we have a guide for you.

Ubud is our hometown and we are fortunate to know many of the amazing creatives making beautiful spaces for people to enjoy.

This is our curated list and includes places we always take friends and family who are visiting. Think art, culture, hidden local gems, incredible views & architecture, artisan products, workshops, and more.

 

How did we choose?

These are all places and experiences that we like to go to ourselves. They are often are located in stunning places with great architecture or views, have good design (interiors, graphics, products), and are worth the money. They are curated with an eye for Bali made or designed with respect to our island home, and often have a connection to local artists and artisans.

Who’s curating the guide?

Elami Productions—producers of Ubud Open Studios, TEDxUbud, and many events and brand experiences in Bali.

What you get:

For Rp100,000 (~$7), you can download The Design Guide to Ubud and add the address pins directly to your Google Maps (download it to use offline).

Our notes are attached to each location explaining why we chose it and what you can’t miss about each pin.

Forever access. We promise to keep it updated with new places.

Rumantra x Powder Room: Afternoon Tea #003

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Continuing with the third afternoon tea party, Powder Room by R4D hosted Rully from Rumantra and his Botanical Line Drawing workshop. An afternoon full of botanical fun and channeling love for plants on paper.

The afternoon tea was paired with teas by Chon Tea, including a Yabukita aracha sencha harvested this spring, blended beautifully with sakura petals that are grown surrounding the tea plantation.

A running list of Ubud and Bali art events in 2023

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A list of exhibitions and events from our favorite artists and galleries across the island. We will keep updating so the most recent event posters will be at the top so you can check what’s happening right now. For details we suggest heading to the Instagrams of each artist and venue.

July 2023

June 2023

Arta Derau’s new art space

Art Moments Bali with DEvFto printmaking institute

The students of Made Griyawan and studio gelombang as part of Ubud Food Festival

Purga ArtSpace (curated by Wicitra Pradnyaratih)

A collaboration between desa and non frasa

ArtNiluh x Powder Room: Afternoon Tea #002

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ArtNiluh by Niluh Pangestu’s recent workshop at Powder Room by Room4Dessert was an afternoon of creativity and good food.

We’ve been so happy to work with Niluh for many years now, collaborating on Elami boxes, a project for an Uluwatu hotel, and for Toko Elami with her beautiful scarves. She’s an amazing Balinese creative and we can’t wait to see what the future holds for her.

Niluh’s work often delves into the world of Balinese women and mythology and you can easily get lost in the details of her pieces.

A linocut is a relief print produced in a manner similar to a woodcut but that uses linoleum as the surface into which the design is cut and printed from.

She led the 12 people through the process of creating and carving their own linocut pieces and then printing them at Powder Room, a new candy shop by Room4Dessert in Ubud.

Arta Derau Prints: a new Ubud art space

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The Elami and Co team headed into the far north of Gianyar to visit the brand new Arta Derau Prints. Co-founders and established artists Sekarputi and Agugn have created the space to be an artist’s residency, exhibition gallery, print-making studio and all round creative compound. Such an unusual and much needed vision for the arts in Ubud. Thank you to the team for having us visit! Can’t wait to see what beautiful things start to happen at Arta Derau Prints over the first year.

About the founders

Sekarputi Sidhiawati is a visual artist who focuses on stories about the empowerment of women to give them and herself the drive to continue working. She mainly works with ceramic, a material that represents domesticity and women in general.

She was born in Jakarta in 1986 and completed her formal education at the Faculty of Art and Design ITB-Ceramic Art studio. She is now known as the founder of the studio Arta Derau, while consistently working in the art world. After working in Bandung, in 2018 she moved to Bali to expand her ceramic studio business. With a focus on women-related issues, Puti is a finalist of several fine art awards such as the Soemardja Art Award (2010) and the Bandung Contemporary Art Award 2013. She has joined several prestigious exhibitions include Jakarta Contemporary Ceramic Biennale, National Gallery of Indonesia (2014); Temperature Affect, Museum of Fine Arts and Ceramics Jakarta (2017); Manifesto, National Gallery of Indonesia (2017); Termasuk, Darren Knight Gallery Australia (2018); Southern Constellations: The Poetics of the Non-Aligned, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Ljublana-Slovenia (2019).

Agugn is a graphic artist who experiments with traditional printing techniques like linocut and woodcut. Since his debut exhibit in 2013, his works have been showcased globally, including NY, Paris, and Tokyo.

Get to Know: Rumantra—illustrator, designer & plantsman

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Rumantra is hard to introduce, a person with many deep loves and multiple projects always going on. People’s eyes tend to get very big once you introduce him and run through the scope of his activities. We asked our favorite multipotentialite some hard-hitting questions….

You wear so many hats, tell us about them all.

Creative Director & Owner at Rumantra, Plant Hoarder at Thousands Bloom, Loyal Servant of Toean Moeda Kanda, Teacher & Founder at Melajah Mandiri (Free Creative Entrepreneurship School for Balinese), Production & Curator at Elami & Co

What’s your favorite plant? Answer quickly!

Musa ‘Little Prince’, the tiniest banana tree in the world!

What’s a plant that everyone should know about and why?

OMG, it's a species of Pitcher plant (Nephentes rajah). It is a carnivorous plant that is able to eat not only insects, but also lizards, small mammals, and even bats! BUT BUT BUT that's not the craziest part, the craziest part is it has this (allegedly) mutual symbiosis with tree shrew, so this plant produces some sort of nectar and attracts tree shrews and when the shrew consumes it it works as a laxative that forces the shrew to poop right into the pitcher. This plant then digests it, just like a multivitamin. Nonbotanist people named this plant the toilet plant.

What do you wish you’d grown up to be?

Biologist! Go on an adventure to the Amazon rainforest, finding new species, studying plants and animals, maybe finding Eldorado?

How has your art practice changed over time?

I was the weirdo in art class back in school, never getting a good grade because my teacher said it was too weird. Then as my interest in biology developed, I got more and more interested in scientific illustration.

Drawing to me is like studying, observing, and even dissecting species of flora & fauna. Fantasizing about being a biologist in a lab but with pencils, pens, and paper instead of creepy knives and lab stuff.

How would you describe your drawing style?

It's a mix of etching, line art and decorative with a drop or two of art nouveau/deco.

Besides art and plants, what else keeps you engaged/enraged?

Animals, music, cultures & tradition, weird geeky stuff, street food and Beyonce.

And finally… what brings you joy working in the Elami team?

I mean there are no crazy new age shitty people here so that's good.

Elami just reeks of creativity which I love, so much room to experiment in creativity like for example decorating a restaurant with moss, live crickets, fish nets, lost flip flops from the beach and LIVE SNAKES!

This office also provides great snacks!







Artist Illustrated RSV Helmets for Ubud Open Studios

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One of our favorite details from Ubud Open Studios was this collaboration between our sponsor RSV Helmets and three studios joining the event.

A different RSV Helmets model was given to Aswino Aji of Sika Gallery, Sekarputi of Arta Derau and Bagus Ari Maruta of Purga Art Space, each with their wildly unique and distinctive styles. They took two weeks to paint the helmets and the final results were amazing. You could even say traffic stopping…

The Afternoon Tea Series at Powder Room by Room4Dessert

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Room4Dessert is ready to launch its newest family member, Powder Room.

Powder Room is the neighborhood candy store, re-imagined. Filled with artisanal candies and sweet treats that bring nostalgia made from local ingredients, healthy alternative sugars and zero added preservatives or ingredients we all can't ever pronounce.

We’re excited to be working with the R4D team again to create a series of afternoon teas featuring Ubud artists, incredible food, and a chance to gather around the long table in the beautiful space that is Powder Room.

The first event is with the creatrix of Arta Derau, Sekarputi.

Spend your Saturday afternoon with us, let your creativity flow drawing the perfect cup design together with Sekarputi from Arta Derau. Powder Room by R4D will be taking care of you afterwards, serving our new lines of best sweets to be paired with the great tisanes from Made Tea.


It's a wrap: the second edition of Ubud Open Studios!

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The 2023 Ubud Open Studios was an incredible honor to put together—70 studios over three days joined to participate in the Studio Showcase at Titik Dua; an Artist Forum including discussions ranging from what it means to be classically trained vs self-taught, to the future of digital art; and two days of studio visits by eager attendees soaking up talks, workshops, and demonstrations.

Our vision for this event was to help revitalize Ubud’s identity as a thriving community of artists, map the incredible creativity taking place in the area and strengthen ties between artists. We hope we succeeded in making that happen. Thank you to all our supporters, partners, and sponsors for helping us produce this event and bring it to life.

“I feel so incredibly fortunate to have been all over Ubud in the past 3 days visiting some amazing artists for the second annual Ubud Open Studios. Not just for the ceramics, painting, sculpture and textiles but also for the wonderful people we met along the way as we weaved through rice paddies and tiny overgrown lanes, discovering places you would never usually gain an insight into... and always welcomed with big beautiful smiles. Thank you Ubud Open Studios - see you next year!”

“It was amazing. You are all rock stars. This felt like a much-needed & exceptionally well-enjoyed event. People should fly in for this. All the art one misses from being in a metropolis exists here but it's behind closed doors, and y'all opened the floodgates. I wish I got to visit more new studios. The ones I enjoyed the most are the ones I've never visited before, a good note to self for next year! Try new things :)”

And our work here is done... Keep an eye on the Ubud Open Studios Instagram for more beautiful shots. Huge thanks to official photographers Arley Mardo, Herry Santosa (photos below), Suki Zoe, and Ade Ardhana.

71 studios joining the 2023 Ubud Open Studios event

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Ubud is such a vessel for amazing creatives and artists. This year we have over SEVENTY studios joining, up from 52 last year. We can’t wait for the doors to open. See the full lineup with links to each Instagram at Ubud Open Studios.

Ubud Open Studios 2023: our second edition!

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We’re very happy to be back in the throes of planning the second Ubud Open Studios! This time we have 70+ studios joining the event!

We will also have a special event hub at Titik Dua Hotel where we will also have a Studio Showcase, an opportunity for you to physically walk through the studio directory. Each studio will be represented by a piece so you will be able to see which studios you’d most like to visit. We have our dear friend Summa Durie lending her curatorial skills to the showcase.

This edition we’ve created one day passes and two day passes, as well as a a community sponsor if you’d like to support the event as a whole. If you’d like a printed catalog, please add that to your ticket before you check out.

Behind the design: Aboubakar Fofana x Threads of Life Workshops

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Threads of Life’s Natural Dye Studio hold regular classes and special workshops by visiting artists. Aboubakar Fofana is an indigo dyer, artist, textile designer, calligrapher and teacher. He is best known for his sublime indigo and mineral mud-dyed textiles. Aboubakar is back for his third time in the Threads of Life Studio and is leading three workshops.

We created the artwork for the 3 classes based on the beautiful colors of the natural dyes, especially the incredible blues of the natural indigo.

Will leave you with some very wise words on the true cost of fashion from Aboubakar Fofana: