Pendant

Contemporary: Lisa Walker

I celebrate and acknowledge my New Zealand contemporary jewellery history, like a dutiful daughter.

Lisa Walker, 2012

With this boldly oversized pāua-shell pendant, Lisa Walker - a self-confessed inheritor of the Bone Stone Shell movement - brings the use of found materials into a 21st-century context.

Rather than scavenging for shell on the beach, Walker sourced a bag of adhesive pāua strips on the online auction site Trade Me. Instead of emphasising the shell’s natural form, she has returned, unexpectedly, to an earlier aesthetic: the lacquered souvenir art that jewellers before her, such as Alan Preston, were reacting against.