Lisa Walker ONZM is New Zealand Aotearoa’s most influential and arguably significant contemporary jewellery artist, her practice encompassing three decades, anchored in a diversity of principles and attitudes, forever raising questions about the possibilities of jewellery, its materials, aesthetics and ideologies. Certainly, the visually loud and intimate nature of Walker’s jewellery touches upon and informs a wider context, perpetually informing humanity’s behavior, its cultures and communities.

Walker has received numerous significantawards in Aotearoa New Zealand and internationally, her jewellery is held in manypublic and private collections, her international recognition further cementingher influential role in international contemporary arts practice.

Walker was born in Wellington in 1967,and in the late 1980s studied at Otago Polytechnic Art School in Dunedin,majoring in jewellery under academic tutor, Georg Beer (1954–2006), Walker’sstudies encompassing working with a diversity of materials, processes, subjectsand themes. Indeed, Walker has seemingly forever possessed an open-endedapproach to jewellery in a diversity of materials and themes, consolidated from1995 onwards, Walker travelling to Germany and studying under prominent Swissgoldsmith and educator, Otto Kuenzli at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, itshistory dating to 1770, a “drawing school” that became the RoyalAcademy of Fine Arts in 1808. Acknowledged as one of the most prestigiousjewellery educational institutions globally, Walker’s six years post-graduatework at the Munich Academy was life-changing, personally and professionally,Walker also meeting and marrying renowned jeweller Karl Fritsch, living andworking in Wellington since 2009.

Studying under Kuenzli’s emphasis onexperimentation and pushing boundaries, Walker gained international attention,her practice identified by an international jury panel that included Dutchdesigner, Paul Mertz (1938–2026), conceptual artist Ted Noten, art historianMarjan Unger, and Belgian artist and jewellery collector, Hilde De Decker.

Walker’s practice and exhibitions have been widely praised for their inventive use of materials and the conceptual depth of her 30-year career, a “freewheeling journey of material and conceptual discovery.”¹

Indeed, Walker has crafted a series of unanticipated objects and subjects that include her 2018 survey exhibition, I want to go to my bedroom but I can’t be bothered, at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and Te Uru Contemporary Art Gallery Auckland with over 250 works, highlighting her exploration of identity and indigenous perspectives, celebrating Māori and Pacific voices in a mix of materials, including copper, pearls, pounamu, LEGO, cell phones and egg beaters.

Walker is rightly the recipient of many prestigious awards, including the Françoise van den Bosch Award and Arts Foundation Laureate in 2015, and as New Zealand Aotearoa’s most influential contemporary jeweler, her practice is as conceptually rich as it is in pushing all possible boundaries. Outwardly comfortable at the edge of something as intense as it is genial, Walker’s practice is intimately human, an exploratio of prominent relationships about art, culture and society in which everything is food for art.

Dr. Warren Feeney

 

¹ See: galleryfunaki.com.au