New Zealand jeweller Lisa Walker’s eclectic and convention-defying works push toward the extreme as she excavates art, history and fashion for ideas and materials to use in her work.

Described as a ‘contemporary archaeologist’, her works look like she ‘took the world, turned its pockets out to lay bare all the detritus of our global, collective subconscious, stuck a chain on it and called it a necklace’. Walker says: “… I am continually pushing towards an expansion in thinking and ways of working… I make reactionary work, consciously active, with influences from all walks of culture and life… I position my work around the boundaries of jewellery, I make pieces for the future.”

Lisa Walker (born 1967, Wellington) studied Craft and Design at Otago Polytechnic and was a founding member of Workshop 6, a jewellery collective in Auckland in the early 1990s. Based in Germany from 1995–2009, Walker studied at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, winning the 2010 Françoise van den Bosch Award – the world’s most prestigious jewellery award. In 2015, Walker was recognised with an Arts Foundation Laureate Award. She has exhibited and published nationally and internationally, notably with her major retrospective show I want to go to my bedroom, but I can’t be bothered in 2018 at Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand. Walker lives and works in Wellington.