Concerning Jewellery

Dear Chicks on Speed, Dear Lisa Walker,

Thank you for carrying the torch, the tradition needs new subversive art, action, poems, music.

Love and respect, Francis Picabia

So reads a forged dedication printed in the zine Touch Me Baby, I’m Bodycentric, a Multimodelplosion that accompanied the exhibition of the same name at Wellington’s City Gallery in 2013. This summoning of the spirit of Dada—with its challenges to taste, complacency and the demand for an imaginative, vigorous intersection of artistic practice with social and political life—makes immediate sense for any visitor to one of Lisa Walker’s recent exhibitions. Explosions of colour, texture, and vibrant collisions of all manner of worldly objects, can be found running fast and loose in a nonstop-punk-crescendo, as the otherwise familiar world of things is put through its paces, under the unexpected pressures of Walker’s seemingly anarchic compositional touch.

The generous energy that pours forth from Walker’s work and exhibition-making aims for its own kind of sensibility. Prioritising immediacy, irreverence and humour, it is a visceral language that