Pocket Guide to New Zealand Jewelry

During the Second World War, American soldiers in New Zealand were issued an informative and witty guide to familiarize themselves with the country in which they were stationed. Published by the War and Navy Departments in 1943, Pocket Guide to New Zealand was, as the name promised, a descriptive guide to the history, culture, peoples and language of New Zealand. "Deep in the heart of the south seas", the guide suggested, soldiers would discover a society both similar and different to America. Reassuring readers that New Zealanders were a pioneering society who had been "seeing our movies, listening to our radio, and reading our magazines", the Pocket Guide to New Zealand concluded that American soldiers would meet "a people with some of the British reserve, with many British methods and institutions, but with American outspokenness and directness "plus a working knowledge of American slang."

Five decades later, the Pocket Guide to New Zealand Jewelry continues this tradition of cultural exchange, introducing a new generation of Americans to contemporary jewelry made "deep in the heart of the south seas". Small enough to fit in your pocket, yet big enough to survey the best contemporary jewelers currently working in New Zealand, the Pocket Guide to New Zealand Jewelry is an indispensable introduction to the history and practice of adornment in a country that continues to transform cultural influences from England (and Europe) and America into jewelry that American audiences will find both familiar and strange.

Lisa Walker's jewelry is a practice of assemblage or bricolage, in which various materials are combined in objects, usually wearable, that ask hard questions about jewelry's traditional preoccupations such as preciousness, permanence and craft or skill. Her work is also often engaged with issues of identity (personal and national), and conducts a thorough exploration of the inherited expectations of New Zealand jewelry around materials and subjects.

At the heart of Warwick Freeman's practice is an investigation of representation, conducted through a sensitivity to the possibilities of signs, especially emblems. Freeman's jewelry deconstructs the values - notably around Pākehā (white settlers in New Zealand) identity, and the role of natural materials in producing a kind of tribal jewelry for urban New Zealanders - that his work had been so critical in establishing.

Alan Preston's jewelry explores the symbols of cross-cultural traffic in New Zealand and the Pacific, such as the motifs on Gothic churches, which are translated into shell and speak of the role of Christianity in the Pacific region as a force of colonization and an important aspect of contemporary Pacific life. Preston's work plays a subtle game in its balancing of "European" materials like silver, and "indigenous" or "local" materials like pāua shell, to create adornment that speaks strongly to the possibilities and problems of living in New Zealand, an island with a British, Māori and Pacific heritage deep in the heart of the South Pacific.

Peter Deckers's jewelry is deeply concerned with the operations of signs and symbols, and in this sense it is linked to the emblem and the cultural implications of signs that is a major strand of New Zealand contemporary jewelry. Deckers is notable for his regular use of installations in presenting his jewelry in the gallery space, creating layered displays that include sound and specially built exhibition furniture to engage the audience in a way that moves beyond the usual transaction between jewelry object and wearer/owner.