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.