Shining examples
Lisa Walker, continues to look forward, writes Dionne Christian
The Wellington wind whips wild around the home jeweller Lisa Walker shares with her partner Karl Fritsch and their children Max and Mia. In their neighbouring studio, an old villa with separate rooms for each of them, gusts rattle the windows, lash the surrounding vegetation and stir up the sea visible from Walker’s workshop.
She maintains her composure, laughing throughout our interview and sharing stories of how she came to be a world-renowned jeweller, a New Zealand Arts Laureate and the 2009 winner of the Dutch Francoise van den Bosch Award. Recipients are selected by an international jury; the award is frequently likened, in the international jewellery world, to winning a Nobel Prize.
That Walker is so unruffled and generous with her time is more remarkable when you consider her diary. This weekend, Te Papa opens its new $8.4 million gallery that spans two levels of the Wellington museum and is part of a major renewal of all its exhibition spaces to mark its
20th anniversary.
Toi Art opens with a “significant new project” by Auckland-based artist Michael Parekowhai along with two major retrospective shows, Pacific Sisters: Fashion Activists and Lisa Walker: I want to go to my bedroom but I can’t be bothered, and two exhibitions showcasing the national art collection, alongside nine new artworks and installations.
It is Walker’s first retrospective and spans her
30-year career; as she’s been readying for that, Walker has also been preparing for the Handwerksmesse International Trade Fair in Munich, one of the world’s largest and most influential trade fairs to exhibit with Fritsch.
Supported by Creative NZ, they’re among a
23-strong delegation of local emerging and established jewellery makers. For the first time at the fair, NZ makers featured in a booth in the Frame Galleries as part of Iwa: New Zealand Makers, Contemporary Jewellery from Aotearoa.
This year Walker also has solo shows at Hamish McKay Gallery in Wellington, Masterworks in Ponsonby and Sao Paulo in Brazil. She says that’s quite normal. Although she’s viewing the Te Papa show as a milestone in her career, she says such a retrospective doesn’t mean she’ll be pausing to think about the next 30 years or viewing it as some sort of turning point.
“. . . as far as my work goes, my work just carries on.”
What is extraordinary is the type of work Walker makes. She uses the terms “studio” and “workshop” interchangeably yet some might split hairs and say technically artists work in studios and jewellers work in workshops, but Walker is both artist and jeweller.
Walker works with an extraordinary range of materials including copper, pearls, and pounamu, to found objects like Lego, cellphones and egg beaters.
Although her work pushes the boundaries, Walker says every piece she creates has to be able to be worn, although she acknowledges some may be tricky to wear for any length of time. Like the tea tray made into a necklace.
Making things has always been part of Walker’s life; apart from one year, flatting in Auckland after leaving her Wellington home, she can’t remember a time when she wasn’t crafting something. Her mother, prominent trade unionist and human rights activist, Viv, was a huge inspiration; as were books and the literary figures she met through her father, Geoff, who, for many years, was director of publishing at Penguin Books.
In her early 20s, Walker started at Otago Polytechnic doing its foundation art and design course and was all about goldsmithing, working with the tools and learning metal-working techniques.
In one project, she experimented with the brief “connect two different materials together” using sheep’s wool and wire but it wasn’t until many years later — after travelling the world, working in all sorts of jobs to earn for the next trip, starting up a collectively run studio in Auckland and then studying in Munich — that she decided she could let lose.
It began at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, one of the most prestigious jewellery educational institutions in the world, where Walker undertook post-graduate studies. She ended up staying in Germany, where she met husband Fritsch, for 15 years.
“When I started studying [in Munich], I kept working and going on the pathway — that was all metal pieces — but I was making a lot of discoveries with tubing and wire. Just by chance, I was thinking about my mother and her feminist mates and the sort of aesthetic that they had — there’s a bit of kitsch in there — and lots of sorts of things about their clothing, furniture and who they are.
“I just sort of put a couple of pieces of fabric together and put another table next to my jewellery bench . . . I put some fabric, some glitter things and some cardboard and just sort of Toi Art opens at Te Papa today and entry is free. Its opening exhibitions include:
• Detour — a seminal new installation that challenges art conventions.
• Pacific Sisters: Fashion Activists – a celebration of mana wahine, indigenous identities and the role this collective has played during 26 years. On until July 8.
• Lisa Walker: I want to go to my bedroom but I can’t be bothered – the 30-year evolution of worldrenowned New Zealand jeweller Lisa Walker. On until July 22.
• Kaleidoscope: Abstract Aotearoa – an exploration of colour, shape and pattern in New Zealand and the Pacific, featuring a new immersive art work by Tiffany Singh.
• Turangawaewae: Art and New Zealand — through Te Papa’s extensive collection of New Zealand painting, sculpture, and photography, explore questions of art, identity, and cross-cultural exchange.
fiddled around and didn’t take any of it away and I just kept adding to that bench. I wasn’t making jewellery . . . then I started to ask myself, ‘can I work like this? Can I not just look at goldsmithing and jewellery? Can I use other parts of my life in my pieces? And, of course, I realised that I could and that revelation plus the new materials I was starting to look at kicked off all this work along with how I began, too, learning goldsmithing techniques at an art school in Dunedin.”
Walker’s Te Papa exhibition is organised chronologically, showing and telling her story from art school to studies in Germany and those revelations that jewellery doesn’t have to be wellbehaved.