Somewhere between a face and an object, these works don’t quite settle. 

‍

HEAD starts with something recognisable, the human head, and builds from there. Forms are stitched and padded, sometimes beaded, worked through as they go, each piece arriving through a series of decisions rather than a fixed plan. What you end up with isn’t a clean portrait or a single, fixed reading. Instead they sit in ambiguity. They read as heads, but not quite as people, something more deliberately constructed, perhaps in part because they are without a body. 

‍

Lisa Walker has spent decades pushing the boundaries of what jewellery is traditionally thought of, into something more open and less predictable. There’s a pull to recognise, to name, to make sense of what you’re looking at. 

‍

Walker is one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most influential contemporary jewellers. Her work has been shown widely across Aotearoa and internationally, including exhibitions such as I Want to Go to My Bedroom but I Can’t Be Bothered, a major retrospective first shown at Te Papa and later presented internationally. 

‍

Working across materials and forms, her practice expands how jewellery might be understood. 

‍

HEAD pulls together a new body of work, presenting Walker’s provocative and deliberate pieces at Te Atamira for the first time.