Bamboo U: My Bamboo Education in Bali

As an artist trying to understand bamboo, I went to Bali to study the structural languages developed there. Bali is the home of contemporary bamboo and the structures they are creating are both visually mind-blowing and structurally fascinating.

What I found was an artisanal culture unlike any I’d seen. Working with the hands is a way of life in Bali; my course at Bali’s Bamboo U showed me that bamboo forces a kind of intelligence that can only be learned through doing.  By making, testing, noticing where something pushes back, and then changing course, I learned bamboo form cannot be separated from its material behaviour. And Bali gave that process a bamboo lineage.

Another important lesson was how to think in terms of structural capacity. In bamboo land, shape is also strength, not simply a stylistic flourish added afterwards.

That influenced and these days I want the logic of construction to remain legible. A good joint is not just strong. It carries a kind of clarity. You can read the decision in it.

Bali widened my sense of what bamboo practice can be. It is not only about building houses. It includes agriculture, treatment, forestry, restoration, tourism, furniture, temporary structures, public art, festivals, and experimental installations.

It also helped me understand that my own bamboo work belongs to a wider contemporary practice in which making, structure and imagination are inseparable.