WEB – KARL + LISA FINALS – Ebony Lamb Photographer 2019-22

ArtNovember 20, 2019

A visit to jewellery artists Lisa Walker and Karl Fritsch in a cottage by the sea

Guest writer
WEB – KARL + LISA FINALS – Ebony Lamb Photographer 2019-22

Spinoff Art editor Mark Amery and photographer Ebony Lamb pay a visit to the internationally celebrated jewellery couple at their colonial cottage above Island Bay.

The white horses are galloping in from the Cook Strait as photographer and singer-songwriter Ebony Lamb (Eb and Sparrow) and I roll in to Island Bay, to the home and studio of jewellery artists Lisa Walker and Karl Fritsch.

Haven’t heard of them? That may be their fault. They are in high demand internationally. When Eb and I visit they’re just back from Lisa’s new solo show in London, and Karl’s about to head off for New York Jewellery Week and a show at his New York dealer. In New Zealand, Karl shows regularly with Hamish McKay Gallery Wellington and The National in Christchurch and both were recently part of Fingers Jewellery’s annual group show in Auckland. In 2018 Lisa was honoured with a major 30-year survey show at Te Papa, I want to go to my bedroom but I can’t be bothered. This year it toured to Melbourne and Apeldoorn in Netherlands, and in March it opens in Munich.

This little place above the boat-bobbing bay is jewellery central. Munich-born Karl moved from Europe with Lisa ten years ago and set up home in Island Bay. When the elderly woman next door passed away, they bought her derelict Victorian workers cottage, all scrim, rimu and faded newspaper. The oldest house in this part of the bay, it provides space for his-and-her studios and workshops, and a spare bed for visiting artists.

I asked Karl and Lisa to tell me about their home, their work and how they combine the two.

Karl Fritsch and Lisa Walker at home. All photos by Ebony Lamb.

Lisa: We’re both lucky to be able to do this full time, though lucky is a weird word, we’ve worked bloody hard! We feel very privileged. When we travel for exhibitions usually one of us will go for their show or project, and the other will stay at home. Every now and again we travel together. Well, our son Max is 20 now, but Mia is 13. She came over to London and Munich in the school holidays which was wonderful. But it’s another story really when you take children!

Karl:  For what we do – the jewellery art thing – it is still so specialised. You need to spread out as far as possible to reach people who are interested in that niche. So we have dealers in New Zealand, Australia…

Lisa:  …London, America, Munich, Sweden. I’ve probably got nine galleries. In New Zealand you have places like The National in Christchurch. Caroline Billing there is brilliant. Masterworks in Auckland, who I’ve worked with for about ten years now.

Karl: And then you have the traditional [galleries], like Fingers in Auckland. Coming to New Zealand I didn’t expect there to be such a scene. With Hamish McKay it was unexpectedly amazing to be included and be part of things here. There was much more of a market than I thought, and opportunities to exhibit and collaborate. It feels like New Zealand is close to jewellery. There’s a real feel about it. It has quite a natural place in the identity I think.

Lisa with hairy ’70s work by Judy McIntosh Wilson in their studio cottage. Photo: Ebony Lamb

Neither of you appear to be wearing jewellery. 

Lisa: No hardly ever! Every now and then I wear something out. I’m always trying on pieces in the workshop

Karl: I only wear when I have to represent. I mean I try all of them on! Around the workshop, yes. Outside, very rarely. Lisa comes over and occasionally puts something around my neck. 

Lisa: When we got the (second) house the whole garden was overgrown and we didn’t know you could see the sea. Yet we’ve very protected from the southerly here, it’s a killer! There’s a room for taking photos and for packaging – to have a whole room for that, unheard of! There’s also Karl’s workshop downstairs; you can go down round the outside or slide down by ladder. I don’t actually go down there.

I’m sure I can see cat fur in amongst Karl’s rings.

Lisa: Yes. That’s Puff. Every time I have a show I find his fur on my pieces… it sticks!

Karl: I always come to a full workshop. There are hundreds of things that want to be finished. I don’t have to start with nothing and think “Oh, what can I do today?” It’s an ongoing process. 

Karl: Working with wax allows you to be very spontaneous. I don’t have to make a sketch. If I have an idea I pretty much make it and it sits there, and I look at it later and see if it’s good. Sometimes I know they’re instantly good but some of them… there’s boxes, 10 years old, where I’m not quite sure if they will make it or not.

Here downstairs I do most of the work with the models. The casting, the turning of wax into metal. All this machinery. I make moulds. The wax goes into flasks and gets embedded in plaster and then gets heated, so the wax melts. Then it goes into what is pretty much a vacuum which sucks air – so the metal gets sucked into all the detail through the plaster. 

Karl Fritsch explaining his process to The Spinoff Art’s Mark Amery. Photo: Ebony Lamb.

It’s hard to get parts here. When something broke down in Germany I could pretty much go around the corner. Here it’s tricky to get an instant fix when I need it. I have two kilns here. One is a New Zealand kiln so I can easily find parts. I need a backup if something goes wrong with the other kiln, because I don’t cast ring by ring. I accumulate say 50 or more rings and then do a session of casting. A whole exhibition in one casting process. So if that goes wrong… 50 to 100 rings… gone! I’m nervous of things breaking down.

I use what I find – stones I have for many years and I use them when they fit. I’ve started using synthetic diamonds and jewels. More people are catching on to this. There feels like there’s a change. Some of the synthetic diamonds are very expensive to make. Some are easier because of the consistency. There’s more awareness of where things come from, how politically correct they are sourced, and how much damage is done at source. 

Lisa’s studio is upstairs. She describes it currently as empty – 13 new pieces have recently been dispatched to London. Lisa and Karl show me some ‘moa stones’ they’ve collected. Perfectly round stones that once lived inside the gizzards of moa, to aid digestion.

Lisa: They’re almost perfect, they’re beautiful

Karl: It’s a good story. How many of these stones that they sell as moa stones have really been in a moa, well that’s the thing! But they were so nice, a group of random pebbles, I thought they’d just be so great in jewellery. But, since we’ve had them… it’s been hard. You suddenly become conscious and less sure whether you should do something with them: do they become work, or is it just better to leave them as a thing?

Lisa: Yes, I couldn’t decide whether I could do something with them. Maybe not. 

Lisa: I collect materials and also I collect online off Instagram and other places. Actually, that’s more of a kick-off for pieces than materials now. I always think that I’ve discovered everything I can on Trade Me, but then I just discovered another great category. It’s just called craft or something. Amazing stuff there. Like I just bought this: a coconut shell bag! With a zip! Do you believe it?! I’ve just reinforced it and now I’m going to paint it somehow, I’m not sure yet. $10! It took him weeks to send it to me.

Lisa: There’s an instinct that collects. A sort of attitude I suppose.

Karl: For me, there’s some excitement that gets kicked off, and that carries on or it may die off.

Lisa: I never get rid of things here. I’m always getting rid of things from the house – but not here! 

More Reading

    I pick up a small, single fake wood log bookend. 

    Lisa: I feel like I’ve exhausted those wooden objects now. I collected a lot of strange quirky wooden things from second-hand stores when I moved back. I never found objects like that in Europe. I probably looked for something like that for three years. Then there are some things you see everywhere – a massive bunch of materials you find in craft or model railway shops all over the world. Other things are more specific to places.

    Lisa Walker and Karl Fritsch. Photo: Ebony Lamb
    Keep going!
    Alexis Hunter, The Object Series, 1974-75. Image courtesy of Trish Clark Gallery.
    Alexis Hunter, The Object Series, 1974-75. Image courtesy of Trish Clark Gallery.

    ArtNovember 16, 2019

    The Spinoff survey on gender bias in the art world, part 2: The galleries respond

    Guest writer
    Alexis Hunter, The Object Series, 1974-75. Image courtesy of Trish Clark Gallery.
    Alexis Hunter, The Object Series, 1974-75. Image courtesy of Trish Clark Gallery.

    Our recent Spinoff Art survey provided a snapshot on gender equality in the local art scene, but it wasn’t the full story. Anna Knox continues the conversation by asking some gallery owners and directors for their responses to our findings.

    The Spinoff’s survey of gender bias in visual arts found that the industry continues to struggle with sexism, with the data suggesting that male art school graduates are four times more likely to succeed as artists than female graduates. However some readers felt that the article itself was biased – against men.

    This reaction had some validity. For my original article I only spoke to one male gallery dealer, and only briefly, although this was mostly due to the lack of response to my query email. However, in the interests of gender equality, I decided to exit my own echo chamber and continue the kōrero.

    Male directors’ response to gender bias

    No-one I talked to denied there was a bias against female artists in Aotearoa. This bias manifests most visibly in the art market, especially in sales at auction houses, and in a wider art world that continues to be dominated by the success of male artists. Gallery directors Michael Lett (of Michael Lett) and Scott Lawrie (of The Vivian) both said it’s an issue that’s raised regularly at their galleries and is something they work actively to address. “It’s proven that there is an unconscious bias,” Lett told me. “The data is the data.”

    At Bowerbank Ninow, Simon Bowerbank was concerned about drawing conclusions from the incomplete data gathered in our survey. “These issues are important and deserve to be investigated in-depth – there is a lot of room for writing that really gets its teeth into gender, ethnicity and class inequalities, in order to build a nuanced picture of the contemporary pressures being placed on both artists and their galleries.”

    Simon Bowerbank and artist Georgie Hill install ‘Residence within a Prism’, Bowerbank Ninow, September 2019.

    Simon ran an auction house from 2015 until earlier this year, and points out that the historical roots must be acknowledged. “The mechanics of the secondary market… are based on the historical artistic canon, which is overwhelmingly male. So, if you are talking about systemic bias, then it’s hard to argue that the art world doesn’t have a bias towards men.”

    In terms of addressing that bias, however, he had no immediate suggestions, although he thought that it was more complicated than looking at percentages and emphasised that he was always just trying to get the best artists he could get.

    Lett is cautious not to approach the issue in a deterministic way, practicing a general awareness rather than aiming for particular numbers. “We try to be conscious in terms of how we programme things, without going into a place where it becomes so obviously skewed in one direction,” he says. He points out that every art fair the gallery has done this year has been a solo exhibition of a female artist but is also careful not to make too much of that. “You don’t want to end up being like an institution or, dare I say it, a kind of funding body, where it’s got to be boy, girl, boy, girl. That to me takes away so much from the achievements of the artists.”

    Hannah Valentine, Toss Woollaston, ‘Something other, held in common’, installation view, Bowerbank Ninow, August 2019.

    The ‘talent’ issue is the crux

    For both Lett and Bowerbank it seems the crux of addressing gender bias lies in this tension between a policy approach which confronts bias systematically, and the fact that art is not just a numbers game. Each dealer represents artists they believe produce work of high quality, but that value is not measured quantitively. There’s a fear of box-ticking – and how that could impact the integrity of each gallery. “It makes me feel sick,” Lett said, when I told him his current ratio of male to female represented artists, according to his website. “But I don’t think a great reaction for us would be to suddenly let five male artists go from our books to correct the balance, or suddenly go out and grab some more female artists.”

    Scott Lawrie, director of The Vivian in Matakana calls this “the talent issue”. Unlike Bowerbank and Lett, he doesn’t consider it a barrier to prioritising gender when considering which artists to represent and show. “Look, I just don’t think it’s that complicated,” he told me. “There’s representation, for which we have a 50/50 model, as best we can. And then there’s showing, and that’s about bringing a holistic balance into your programming over a year.”

    It might be his smaller gallery and his slightly maverick status in the New Zealand art world that permits it – he’s Scottish, a star of Grand Designs NZ season 1, and bought The Vivian partly to allow more room for his own collection – but he makes the process of addressing gender bias seem very simple. “There’s this idea that it’s tokenism. Dealer Melanie Rogers says it’s got to be about the art. And she’s absolutely right of course – it’s got to be about the art!” he told me. “But there’s a moment of consciousness where you go – who are we going to choose to get the balance right?”

    Scott Lawrie of The Vivian, Matakana

    Enjoy diversity

    Knowing that the art community in Aotearoa is varied and numerous, I went to Enjoy Contemporary Art Space in Wellington for a different perspective from a non-profit sector. Director Sophie Davis said Enjoy responds directly to bias through their organisational culture, which is very distinct from that of a private gallery, where a director is not necessarily answerable to anyone. With a board that is all-female, bar one, it’s unsurprising that white male artists aren’t over-represented at the gallery.

    Davis said gender bias to be a given in visual arts but also that data an insufficient, even inappropriate, way to look at it. Like Bowerbank, she was wary of the data we analysed in our original survey, and of responding to it. She suggested that talking to individuals about their experiences would be better and told me the gallery would never ask an artist about data points such as gender or ethnic identity.

    There’s something powerful in being concerned only with your immediate, unique community and their experiences, but it has its own limits. In the sixth (brief, frank, beautiful) essay accompanying Enjoy’s current Present Tense: Wāhine Toi Aotearoa exhibition, writer Emma Ng describes those working in the creative industries as being “of diverse genders, ethnicities, and economic realities” which is close to how Davis described Enjoy’s board. But how does this translate into shifting the overall status quo in the market for non-male artists?

    Imogen Taylor, ‘Betwixt and Between’, Installation View, Michael Lett, Auckland, 2019.

    Anon, carry on

    “Everything intersects,” Lett said when I asked him how he evaluates a potential artist or work. “When you make a decision you’re often thinking about who is already of interest to other people, you are picking up on a zeitgeist of sorts, you’re looking at where there is interest from museums or curators or writers.”

    His point is that the value of an artist is not established singularly.

    But what makes an artwork valuable, appealing, part of the zeitgeist, worthy of attention and focus, or marketable? And what would happen if somehow, magically, all artworks suddenly became anonymous and the question of gender identity was removed from evaluation? If we had zero data on identity, would the historically-rooted bias in favour of the success of white, male artists continue?

    Acknowledging the reality of gender bias is something everyone in this brief discussion seemed to agree on. But it’s the first sentence in what needs to be an ongoing multi-faceted kōrero on how to address that imbalance.

    Fiona Connor, Shop Doors, 2005. Sold at Webb’s Auction House in September, 2019. Price Realized incl. BP$10,516.25. Estimated at $6,000-$10,000. A recent sale highlight by a living woman artist from a Webb’s auction.