Gold and Bones

Artist list

Lisa Walker

About 3 years ago I used a fully formed bone for the first time in a necklace. Of course bones belong as much to jewellery as gold and diamonds when you look at jewellery´s history.

New Zealand also has a special history in regards to bone, with maori bone carving (as pendants) becoming standard wear for any New Zealander today. Contemporary jewellery in New Zealand has explored the idea of bone in jewellery for about the last 30 years, with jewellers like Warwick Freeman being at the forefront of this movement. The bone was always carved though, so I feel I´m taking a different angle using a fully formed bone.

Bones are connected to death, to evil, to the negative, I´m attracted to this.

Bones are good.

There´s enough reasons for me to use this material, and enough stories I could follow.

I´ve also used metal and plastic bone shapes to see what I could come up with.

Gold I´ve touched on over the years, I´ve always wanted to use more of it but couldn´t afford it. It´s a gorgeous, beautiful, flexible material, that has this unbelievable history attached to it, you can´t escape it. Gold can transform the preciousness of a piece (though preciousness can certainly exist without gold), I like this and try to play with it sometimes.

I discovered a technique of covering the drying glue from a hot glue gun, with gold leaf, then gently kneading it till the glue hardened completely, creating globule type gold shapes that could be used for all sorts of purposes.

Decorating a fully formed bone with gold has this exciting existential quality, how far can I go with something so elemental as mixing gold and bone?


Lisa Walker 2008