Batik and Its Intangible Creative Process w Nia Fliam - Aug 23 - 24

Dates: Aug 23, 2025 → Aug 24, 2025
Times: Sat & Sun 10 am - 6 pm  (14 hours instruction) (plus 1 hour lunch break)
Level: All levels
Members Price: $405 (Members use discount code MEMBERS10 at checkout to receive 10% off)

Workshop Description:
Hosted in collaboration with Babaran Segaragunung Culture House.

This workshop is a rare opportunity to engage with the world of batik as both a hands-on art form and a deep cultural process. This two-day workshop is led by Nia Fliam—one half of the renowned artistic duo Brahma Tirta Sari (with her partner Agus Ismoyo)—whose work draws from decades of exploration across Indonesia, Australia, Africa, and North America. Participants will learn directly from Nia’s lived experience of batik as a practice that unites visual artistry with cultural and spiritual depth.

Presented in collaboration with Babaran Segaragunung Culture House, a cultural organization based in Indonesia dedicated to nurturing creative growth through traditional wisdom and artistic practice, this program welcomes participants into a unique space of shared learning. Through the batik process, it invites a reconnection with inner intuition, ecological sensibility, and ancestral knowledge.

Whether you're joining for one or both days, you’ll step into a creative process rooted in symbolic tradition, meditative movement, and cultural memory.

- No prior batik experience needed.

Workshop Schedule

Day One: Tools, Dyes, and Design

An introduction to the material and symbolic language of batik. Using traditional tools and natural dyes, participants will explore design-making through the lens of heritage and intentionality.

Day Two: Ancestral Knowledge and Creative Flow

Going beyond technique, this day centers on the creative process itself—engaging body, mind, and spirit. Rooted in the Javanese worldview of Tribawana (the three realms: self, nature, and source), the experience includes symbolic design, guided exercises, and reflection practices.

Extended evening open studio hours will be available for students to work on their projects.

Facilitators: 

Nia Fliam, co-founder of Brahma Tirta Sari and Babaran Segaragunung Culture House. Nia bridges fine arts training and decades of engagement with Javanese philosophy and traditional practices.

Desmond Anabrang Fliam-Ismoyo, deeply immersed in the legacy of batik since childhood, Desmond brings a multigenerational perspective to the evolving cultural relevance of this practice.

Who Should Join?

Artists, educators, cultural workers, designers, students—anyone with an interest in creative process, traditional knowledge, or ecological and cultural sustainability.

Required Material list: (student responsibility) $25 Materials fee to be paid directly to instructor. Cash is appreciated.

All workshop materials are provided. Please wear clothes you’re comfortable getting messy, and bring a cloth for your lap and a notebook if you’d like to reflect or journal.

Optional Material list:

Optional: A drawing pad and 3B pencils for those who want to begin designing personal symbols.

About the Instructor:
Crossing both visible and invisible boundaries of nationality-ethnic background, the traditional and the contemporary, art-craft of Nia Fliam (American) and Agus Ismoyo (Indonesian) have been working collaboratively to produce contemporary textiles in their fine art batik studio, Brahma Tirta Sari in Yogyakarta, Indonesia since 1985. Ismoyo’s ancestors were batik makers in the court city of Solo in Java. He was trained in industrial management at the Industrial Academy (AKPRIND) in Yogyakarta. Nia originally explored dye resist techniques from Africa and Asia in America. She completed her fine arts degree at Pratt Institute in New York City before coming to Indonesia in 1983 to study traditional batik.

‘This collaborative art team is renowned for their intricate, nuanced and time-intensive contemporary fine art textiles. They have exhibited at many prestigious exhibitions including biennale and the triennial exhibitions in Indonesia and around the world and worked with world distinguished curators. Their work has been collected by museums throughout the world in public and private collections. Since 1994 they have explored and worked in collaboration with Australian Aboriginals, American First Nation, African artists from Mali and Nigeria and various Asian, American, European and Australian artists. They have received critical acclaim for their successful use of traditional textile techniques in exploring their own realm of creativity while pursuing an understanding of the value, role and meaning of tradition in the development of our world culture.’ Christine Cocca, Director Yogyakarta Open Studios, Yogyakarta Indonesia.

When Ismoyo and Nia founded their studio, they were committed to exploring the rich lessons of traditional Indonesian art both in terms of technique as well as symbolism. Beyond the creative process and symbols of these ancient techniques they have found an unending rich source of inspiration in an ever-expansive journey of artistic discovery.

Their studio produces fine art batik Brahma Tirta Sari (BTS), which means ‘creativity is the source of all knowledge’, and was founded on the belief that there are many relevant traditions rooted in cultures throughout the world which are important resources in the creation of contemporary art. Brahma Tirta Sari is a division of the Culture House Babaran Segaragunung which Ismoyo, Nia, Pang Warman, Desmond Anabrang and Agung Harjuno founded to support their exploration of traditional cultures, in order to understand basic cultural principles found through local wisdom that act as a guide through an integral artistic process. The focus of the culture house activities is the understanding and teaching of batik’s intangible culture found through its ancient creative process.

Regarding their own work Ismoyo and Nia explain:

it is very interesting for us to be able to feel, understand and utilize the values we find inherited through our ancestors. This knowledge is the path we wish to continue. We describe this as the process of ‘Growth in Rootedness’. An integration that is like a tree whose roots stretch deep into the earth and whose branches, leaves and fruit rise high and touch the sky with the spirit of new growth.

www.babaransegaragunung.org/ /bsg.culturehouse/baragung.bsg

www.brahmatirtasari.org