Radio Lisa Walker

Current Obsession is excited to introduce a new project in our practice of jewellery experiments. We’ve teamed up with Ja Ja JA Nee Nee Nee – online radio dedicated to the arts and CODA Museum in Apeldoorn, to create this multi-dimensional interview with a renown Wellington based jewellery artist Lisa Walker.

Lisa Walker came to the Netherlands to open her retrospective exhibition ‘She Wants to go to her bedroom but she can’t be bothered’ at CODA museum, an exhibition that looks back on 30 years of her practice as a contemporary jeweller.

As content developers in contemporary jewellery, we treasure the opportunity to speak to Lisa Walker about her work, but we also want to take the conversation outside of the ‘jewellery bubble’, and take a look at our field through the eyes of practitioners from other disciplines. That’s why we asked JJJNNN, an independent radio station that operates in the fields of arts, architecture and design, Arif Kornweitz – its co-founder and host at JJJNNN and Tamar Shafrir – writer, lecturer, and teacher in the extended field of design – to have a look at our research and books on Lisa Walker and prepare some questions for her.

We also asked Lisa to bring along some music tracks that she listens to while she works in her studio. So settle down, relax and enjoy some jewellery inspiration!

Walker is an artist/jeweller/designer working in the area of contemporary jewellery. Her work is a study into the differences between an accepted notion of beauty or stereo-type, and something else – the search for a quality that we hardly ever see, but nevertheless perhaps recognise. Walker says “I don’t want to make pieces that are easily steered through our established channels, I want people to be forced to work on new syllogisms, analogies and positions.” She is continually pushing towards the extreme – a method which enables an expansion in thinking and ways of working.Walker uses a large range of materials and techniques. She makes reactionary work, consciously active with influences from all walks of culture and life. The pieces are often laced with references to contemporary jewellery of the last forty years, questioning and researching what jewellery means, what it can be.Walker largely positions her work around the history, future, and boundaries of jewellery. She makes pieces for the future.