LISA WALKER

SEPTEMBER 08

solo exhibition UNWEARABLE at Objectspace, Auckland, New Zealand

MARCH 09

–Beginning of March - Launch of Unwearable Appendix book, at the Handwerksmesse, Munich, Germany, by Darling Publications, Cologne, New York. The Unwearable Appendix is a 2nd edition of Unwearable (printed 2008). It´s content includes the orignal Unwearable, plus an extra chapter of 40 pages including 2008 pieces and projects, only 21 copies of this edition have been bound. In 2010, 500 copies of the absolute final edition will be printed and bound. This edition will include a chapter of 2009 pieces and projects too.

–Solo show UNWEARABLE at the Craft Victoria, Melbourne, Australia
–Workshop and lecture at the Gerrit Rietveld Acadamy in Amsterdam, Holland.
–Lecture at the Bezalel University (Jerusalem, Israel) conference called " creation positions: fashion and Jewelry ".

–Necklace for the exhibition Viva Le Craft, Chicks On Speed at Craft Victoria, Melbourne, Australia

APRIL/ MAY 09

–Lecture series with Damian Skinner at –
Pforzheim University, Pforzheim, Germany
Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, Birmingham, England
Royal Academy of Art, London, England
London Metropolitan University, London, England
Middlesex University, Middlesex, England
Acadamy of Fine Arts, Munich, Germany
Koninkliijke Academie of Fine Arts Antwerpen, Belgium
Sint Lucas, Antwerpen, Belgium
Provinciale Hogeschool, Limbug, Belgium
–Solo exhibition SOMETIMES at the Caroline Van Hoek Gallery, Brussels, Belgium

JUNE

a very nice text written by Damian Skinner
Some notes on two new necklaces by Lisa Walker

Damian Skinner

It can be a strange experience viewing Lisa Walker’s work from the perspective of New Zealand, her home country. Like the rest of the contemporary jewellery scene, we find her jewellery to be a challenge to our expectations and presumptions of what jewellery is. Her attack on the notion of permanence and the lingering expectations that jewellery should adorn and beautify the owner/wearer is ferocious and sometimes audacious, and, if you can accept it’s terms, kind of thrilling. But if a New Zealand viewer can share in what makes Walker an important and interesting jeweller within the world of European contemporary jewellery, we can also discern a dimension in her practice that speaks specifically to our history, the issues of jewellery that have emerged in New Zealand in the past forty years. I suspect that these elements remain invisible to most viewers, simply because New Zealand jewellery is mostly invisible within Europe and America, and the points of reference cannot be recognised. I wouldn’t claim that this makes us better, or more privileged, viewers of Walker’s jewellery, but I think it does go some way to explaining why, in certain cases, Walker makes the choices that she does. And it highlights the intentionality and intelligence of her practice.

In her recent exhibition Sometimes at the Caroline Van Hoek gallery in Brussels, Walker presented two necklaces that seem to me to be particularly good examples of the way connections to New Zealand jewellery animate her work. The first, illustrated on the exhibition invitation, is a very long string from which various objects are suspended. The range of materials is typically bewildering, including plastic, rubber, aluminium, copper, rabbit fur, nail polish – all of which are suspended on waxed thread. Walker’s promiscuous use of materials is matched by the sheer strangeness of the elements that make up this necklace. A digital watch, a tiny snow globe, a wheel from a toy car, some fake bling, a light switch, a piece of pipe, a plastic souvenir: this is only a selection of the objects, all of which are surrounded by dozens of plastic ‘pods’, a humble and ornamental element that gives the disparate materials and objects coherence, visually holding the necklace together.

Walker notes that this particular necklace is part of a new investigation into the relationship between contemporary jewellery and fashion jewellery:

I know I´m not alone when I flick through magazines and come across quite exciting, striking, inventive jewellery in the fashion pages. In some of the more underground edgy magazines especially, there´s occasionally some really good jewellery to be seen. There´s some interesting lines here regarding what we contemporary jewellers do, and what the fashion jewellers make. Recently for the Förderpreis der Stadt München (City of Munich Scholarship) there were two colleagues of mine from contemporary jewellery in the exhibition, plus a jeweller no one had heard of who also lives in Munich and works in fashion. Her work wasn´t bad, it could hold its own, so there´s some interesting issues about whether the two worlds should be judged together like that, in this case in an exhibition for a very respected prize. Anyway, within all the fashion jewellery versus contemporary jewellery thoughts I´ve been having, I made this necklace. I kind of pretended I was a fashion jeweller. The necklace had to be quite flamboyant and striking, look good in a photo. The result is perhaps something I would have made anyway but I think this necklace is the start of research into what these issues mean to me.

It is exactly in these kinds of ways that Walker conducts her critique of, and contribution to, contemporary jewellery practice. Her ability to identify a space in which to make, and a set of questions to address – which will, importantly, result in a distinctive piece of contemporary jewellery – are what make her a noted member of the European jewellery community. Without a doubt this necklace fits into a history of, and speaks to the current trends of, contemporary jewellery. But it is also holding a conversation with New Zealand jewellery. The invitation to make this reading is in the plastic souvenir Walker has included along with the detritus of everyday consumerism in this necklace. It is a hei tiki, a Maori neck adornment made in greenstone or bone and, as here, in plastic for the tourism industry. Ubiquitous, and both sacred and profane, the tiki is one of the symbols with a rich and complex life in New Zealand culture, and Walker’s decision to include it here is a statement about where she comes from (Aotearoa New Zealand), her biography (living in Munich, is she anything other than a tourist when she goes home?), and the role of symbols in contemporary jewellery (should Pakeha, European New Zealanders, use Maori culture, and can this ever be anything more than a kind of theft and appropriation?).

And if we follow this signpost, it becomes impossible to overlook the fact that this necklace looks just like a lei, a Pacific adornment that takes the form of a large necklace worn around the neck. Lei are sometimes given in welcome, and they are worn on ceremonial and celebratory occasions. In New Zealand, the large Pacific population makes lei out of a diverse range of materials, making the most of everyday materials like plastic, synthetic flowers, even wrapped sweets, in order to make a humorous yet serious commentary on the ironies of modern, urban life, and the way that cultures adapt to new materials and circumstances while maintaining their relevance and importance. So Walker makes a lei within the realm of contemporary jewellery, one which sparks off in different directions, holding a number of conversations at the same time, activated or not depending on who is looking, and why.

There’s another necklace in this exhibition that has similar concerns, although its reference points are slightly different. The cell phone necklace is, firstly, a kind of pure statement of the readymade in Walker's jewellery, something she is constantly dancing around. It is a kind of game. How much or how little can you do to something to transform it into your work, to make it turn into jewellery? What is the weirdest kind of object you can use in a piece of jewellery and get away with it? What kind of intervention is going to be most successful? This necklace is bold and straightforward (the cell phones and nothing else) but there are also a series of other decisions going on that don't declare themselves upfront but are still important: the decision to paint them different colours, whether they are used frontally or turned over, the visual rhythm of how they are arranged around the cord. I think this is a perfect example of Walker's lack of care and extreme care, all bundled up into one work. And even the choice of cell phone type is inspired – old, but not so old that we can't recognise it, so that she is activating a certain kind of tension between us and the objects in the necklace, how we connect and are disconnected at the same time. And then of course it is a bit of a pun about communication and individuality and statements of identity – after all, cell phones are major status symbols. What does it say when you put on a necklace of out-of-date models?

But as with the necklace that is also a lei, the cell phone necklace stages a particular connection to New Zealand jewellery. This is through the way she has constructed the piece: simple repeated elements strung onto a cord. This approach is very typical of the bone stone shell jewellery movement in New Zealand in the 1980s, which took its lessons from Pacific adornment and updated them for the requirements of contemporary jewellery. Even the way she has secured the cell phones – three strands which drill through and wind around the phones – is a technical solution pioneered by Alan Preston and Warwick Freeman for use with shell, bone and stone elements. And when you throw in the cell phone as a communication device, a way of bridging distance, the necklace becomes quite witty, talking about distance and difference and her own position as a jeweller in exile.

Both of these necklaces are a very strong statement of Walker's ongoing relationship to, and commitment to, New Zealand jewellery history. This is one of the major forces that make her work distinctive in a European context. Her ability to play a game with both European jewellery and New Zealand jewellery makes her jewellery a joy to experience both at home and abroad.