An unreliable guidebook to jewellery accompanies the retrospective exhibition Lisa Walker: She wants to go to her bedroom but she can't be bothered at RMIT Design Hub Gallery. Lisa's vast body of work can be thought of as a career-length conversation with the question 'What is jewellery?'
Known for work that has questioned the very nature of jewellery – its past, present and potential future – Walker mixes materials and ideas in an investigative practice that constantly reconsiders its own answers.
Working with found objects, precious and non-precious materials, abandoned bits and bobs, pieces, parts and leftovers, Walker’s works are intuitive and impetuous, but hardly irreverent. She understands the significance of her choices, her references and her results, and celebrates her influences as much as her finished work. . She transforms, commingles, rewrites and recreates her influences and inspirations into pieces that are beyond our expectations of jewellery.
From gold foil to sports balls, cherished Pounamu jade to lost woolly knits, snakes of steel paste or an old cotton jumper, Walker’s materials are handled with a heady, contrary mix of recklessness, reverence, irony, and resolve. Her jewellery works never fail to surprise and thrill, and once again shatter our expectations of jewellery.
