Lee Richardson (The Gathering)

Pebble Necklace
silver & white gold,western pounamu/greenstone pebbles
length: 350mm
A nov19   #8
NZD $1,600

 

Lee has been involved and surrounded with stone for the majority of her life. She has been carving for the past twenty years ever since she could reach out and touch stone. Lees work with art first started with using semi precious stone and organic treasures in her childhood. She remembers shells, stones, sticks, bone and all sorts being found and collected in her pockets.

Lee focused for some time on basic jewellery making and ceramics, which then extended into shaping limestone which swiftly became a strong interest involving many stone symposiums in and around New Zealand and Europe during the 1990s till mid 2000s

Lee has had some training, attending a few jewellery classes. He mainly learnt his trade while on the job over time, simply through working with sculptors au fait in many mediums, ice, stone , precious gems metals,wood, paint, sound, seemingly anything.

Lee has also travelled to the Uffizi in Firenze, Italy, the Louvre in Paris as well as other notable places to be inspired and get her fix of art, history, painters and sculptors while travelling to stone carve symposiums.

Lee wanted to explore hard stone carving, so decided to travel to the West Coast of the South Island, New Zealand to check out the tools and techniques. There, she enrolled with the jade carving course at Tai Poutini and completed her first year in 2004. She has since returned to Polytech and completed a Diploma focusing on both smaller hard stone sculpture and developing silver-smithing skills to further scope in jewellery.