Linda Garland: A promoter of bamboo

Linda Garland: A promoter of bamboo

By Amir Sidharta

DENPASAR (JP): The founder of the Environmental Bamboo Foundation, Linda Garland, gave up her career as an internationally renowned designer for the sake of the environment, particularly for what bamboo can do for the preservation of Mother Nature.

Garland has made Indonesia her home for the past 20 years. In Indonesia she established her reputation as the most famous designer of bamboo furniture.

Born in Ireland, Garland's career as an interior designer started in London. Early on, she was sent to Mexico to collect Arts and Crafts for the Marlborough Gallery in London, for which she worked. Upon her return, people started to ask her to decorate their houses based on the artifacts she brought back. Later she traveled to Haiti, Thailand and the Philippines to develop designs based on the work of the skillful local craftpersons in each area.

"When you're on the craft grapevine, you find out where the centers are. Eventually, I was told I must go to Bali," she said. Garland came to Indonesia in 1974 on a visit that would continue for the remainder of her lifetime.

Falling in love with the island, she decided to stay. In 1978, she married Amir Rabik, a Madurese designer who was also living in Bali. Together, they became what could be considered as the most inventive design team in Bali. They developed attractive furniture and decorative objects from Balinese-derived designs.

Garland's most famous design are the gigantic bamboo sofas she started making in the 1970s. The sofas' popularity reached its peak in the 1980s, but the design has since been extensively copied by neighboring craftsmen of the village in which she produced them.

Her encounter with the giant bamboo which has become her trademark happened while snorkeling in Lake Batur in 1977. Grabbing onto the outrigger of a canoe she had always thought to be a wooden log, Garland was amazed that it was bamboo. "I brought it back to the house and hired a worker to come fiddle around with it. After a few weeks, we came up with some rickety furniture," she recalled, and things progressed from there.

Garland continued to work with different materials and added a western touch to Balinese woodcarving, some of which became the source of inspiration for carvings currently found in the markets. Taking advantage of modern chemistry in textile design techniques, she also developed what is known today as Bali Batik. Garland made Balinese art more popular and marketable by incorporating its elements into the commercial household items she designed.

Sophistication

She later worked with craftsmen in Java and other parts of Indonesia. She gave new life to Indonesian craft, ensuring it a place in the international market. The sophistication of Garland's designs has attracted such celebrity clients as musician David Bowie, Virgin Records's Richard Branson, Chris Blackwell, Mark Shands and David Gilmour to commission her to design the interiors of their vacation estates.

While she is very proud of the international acclaim she has received from her international clientele, she considers the 1990 Upakarti award for "unselfish and relentless contributions toward the guidance and advancement of small industries and crafts in conjunction with the development of national industries" she received from President Soeharto as the culmination of her efforts.

The following year, Garland decided to bid farewell to the design world.

Apparently, what brought her work to the forefront of the interior design world became the very reason for her retreat. When her bamboo furniture became tremendously popular in the 1980s, the craftsmen she commissioned to produce it started using randomly cut bamboo, without considering its starch content. Shipments of furniture to clients overseas turned to dust as powder post beetle devoured the bamboo along with the plant's starch the pests deemed palatable.

Garland searched high and low for a solution. The only remedy seemed to be selective harvesting of the bamboo combined with chemical pesticides and treatments. Her attempts in using chemically friendly material failed and she unwillingly started to phase out her bamboo designs.

She began to use wood extensively, but continued her quest for a solution. A few years ago, still preoccupied with bamboo, she looked for more information on the plant. While researching bamboo at the Natural History Museum in London in April 1992, Garland discovered that several international organizations had been conducting extensive scientific research on bamboo in 12 Asian countries for the last decade. Initially hoping to find a solution to her bamboo problems, she instead found herself intertwined within a network of scientists, engineers, architects and environmentalists who were finding in bamboo the solutions to problems in their respective fields.

Her discovery led Garland to find the solution to the problem of powder post beetles. She decided to establish the Environmental Bamboo Foundation in 1990, using US$200,000 of her personal funds, "in order to incorporate a multidisciplinary approach to developing bamboo as an environmentally responsible non-wood forest resource for ecological, social and economic benefit of Indonesia and planet earth." She has become personally committed to finding solutions for her environmental concerns regarding the world's diminishing tropical forest resources.

While Garland's mission to fight for bamboo is indeed noble, many people are disappointed by her decision to leave the design world. But, in reality, it is impossible for her to leave completely.

Garland has, under the auspices of her foundation, begun to establish a design center on her estate to allow other designers to develop prototypes of bamboo products that will help encourage the use of bamboo as an aesthetic alternative for timber. She has developed designs, with the help of craftsmen from Flores and other parts of the Indonesian archipelago, that incorporate bamboo.

A synergetic relationship between design and scientific knowledge will be the key to Garland's success. She has realized that to make her design center work, she will have to make available the right species of properly treated bamboo. This will require knowledge about the properties of commercially-viable species, their growth cycles, cultivation, harvesting, treatment and production techniques. Nonetheless, design also plays a central role in expanding the use of the miracle plant called bamboo.

In the past, Garland concentrated merely on the superficial esthetics of her products. Her interest in the more technical aspects of the material she loves has led her on a quest beyond the simple substance of bamboo to its potential to help save the world.