Lisa Walker: She wants to go to her bedroom but she can’t be bothered
28.01.2019 – 03.05.2019
She wants to go to her bedroom but she can’t be bothered was a retrospective of the practice of New Zealand jeweller Lisa Walker. Lisa’s vast body of work is a career-length conversation with the question: what is jewellery? So much of what we want to say about the medium and the discipline of jewellery can be found in her work: it is simultaneously wearable and unwearable, precious and non-precious, skilfully and not skilfully made; it is in dialogue with jewellery’s past as well as current social and political issues and, sometimes, it is meaningless. Lisa’s jewellery is controversial in many of the moves it makes but now, nearly 30 years after she began creating work, her radical gestures are the establishment. The exhibition tracked how Lisa continues to query the tools, methods and materials for making jewellery, and how her work appropriates and transforms its influences. Lisa’s research practice – circling around the history, future and limits of jewellery – takes us into the realm of extremes with the aim of making jewellery, and our encounter of it, more alive.
She wants to go to her bedroom but she can’t be bothered was accompanied by All the jewellery, an exhibition that exists in a relationship with Lisa Walker’s retrospective. This exhibition had free workshops which tackled key questions about contemporary jewellery. It brought together a community of jewellers, gallerists and collectors and those in the professions that support jewellery-making into a weekly conversation.
Accompanying this exhibition was a significant publication titled An unreliable guidebook to jewellery by Lisa Walker. Edited by Kate Rhodes and Nella Themelios. Graphic Design by Ziga Testen and Kim Mumm Hansen. New photography by Layla Cluer.
Exhibition design: Lisa Walker
Graphic design: Ziga Testen and Kim Mumm Hansen
RMIT Design Hub Gallery Team: Kate Rhodes, Nella Themelios, Erik North, Tim McLeod, Layla Cluer, Michaela Bear, Ari Sharp, Simon Maisch, Gavin Bell, Jessica Wood, Ian Bunyi, Síofra Lyons, Luke Pringipas
Lisa Walker is represented by Gallery Funaki.
These exhibitions were a part of the 2019 Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival, Melbourne Art Book Fair organised by the National Gallery of Victoria and Melbourne Design Week 2019 organised by the National Gallery of Victoria in collaboration with Creative Victoria.
