Unity, Complexity, and Intensity in Upcycled Paper Craft: Aesthetic Value at Gegaen Lima Craft, Sudaji Village, Bali

Abstract

Paper waste is among the most abundant and least valorised household residues in rural Bali, yet studies of Balinese upcycled craft have concentrated on bamboo, wood, and coconut materials, leaving paper-based practice largely undocumented and never examined as an aesthetic medium. This article examines how aesthetic value is constituted in upcycled paper craft at Gegaen Lima Craft, a household micro-enterprise in Sudaji Village, Buleleng Regency, established in 2015, which converts discarded school textbooks into fifteen types of household, ceremonial, and accessory products through a coiling-and-weaving technique. The study follows a descriptive qualitative design. Fieldwork at the enterprise combined participant observation of the production process, semi-structured interviews with the founder and the relatives and neighbouring producers who work with her, and systematic photographic documentation of the complete product range, which was analysed as an exhaustive corpus of sixteen documented items. Monroe Beardsley’s criteria of unity, complexity, and intensity provide the analytical framework, applied first to each item and then comparatively across four functional categories. Aesthetic value in this craft is generated primarily through intensity rather than through applied ornament: because the coiled paper strand is the sole formal vocabulary available, distinction arises from precision of execution and from the disciplined repetition of a single element across differing forms. Complexity varies inversely with functional constraint, except in ceremonial vessels, where cultural significance prompts deliberate elaboration; unity follows from the constructive logic of coiling itself. Upcycled paper craft sustains local material culture not by imitating traditional media but by reproducing traditional object-types in a new material register.